Concurrent and independent operations to the remote encrypted cloud database from many geographically distributed clients

Abstract

since data in cloud will be placed anywhere, because of the critical nature of the applications, it is important that clouds be secure. The major security challenge with clouds is that the owner of the data may not have control of where the data is placed. This is because if one wants to exploit the benefits of using cloud computing. This requirement imposes clear data management choices: original plain data must be accessible only by trusted parties that do not include cloud providers, intermediaries, and Internet; in any untrusted context, data must be encrypted. Satisfying these goals has different levels of complexity depending on the type of cloud service. We propose Secure DBaaS as the first solution that allows cloud tenants to take full advantage of DBaaS qualities, such as availability, reliability, and elastic scalability, without exposing unencrypted data to the cloud provider. The architecture design was motivated by goal: to allow multiple, independent, and geographically distributed clients to execute concurrent operations on encrypted data, including SQL statements that modify the database structure. The proposed architecture has the further advantage of eliminating intermediate proxies that limit the elasticity, availability, and scalability properties that are intrinsic in cloud-based solutions. The efficacy of the proposed architecture is evaluated through theoretical analyses and extensive experimental results based on a prototype implementation subject to the TPC-C standard benchmark for different numbers of clients and network latencies.