Secure Data Outsourcing

The networked and increasingly ubiquitous nature of today’s data management services mandates assurances to detect and deter malicious or faulty behavior. This is particularly relevant for outsourced data frameworks in which clients place data management with specialized service providers. Clients are reluctant to place sensitive data under the control of a foreign party without assurances of confidentiality. Additionally, once outsourced, privacy and data access correctness (data integrity and query completeness) become paramount. Today’s solutions are fundamentally insecure and vulnerable to illicit behavior, because they do not handle these dimensions. In this tutorial we will explore how to design and build robust, efficient, and scalable data outsourcing mechanisms providing strong security assurances of (1) correctness, (2) confidentiality, and (3) data access privacy. There exists a strong relationship between such assurances; for example, the lack of access pattern privacy usually allows for statistical attacks compromising data confidentiality. Confidentiality can be achieved by data encryption. However, to be practical, outsourced data services should allow expressive client queries (e.g., relational joins with arbitrary predicates) without compromising confidentiality. This is a hard problem because decryption keys cannot be directly provided to potentially untrusted servers. Moreover, if the remote server cannot be fully trusted, protocol correctness become essential. Therefore, solutions that do not address all three dimensions are incomplete and insecure.