CloudDBguard: Enabling sorting and searching on encrypted data in NoSQL cloud databases

Abstract

Efficient and secure data management in the cloud is a topic of high relevance. Cloud databases play an important role – in particular, because they can offer various options for processing large amounts of data. In this article we discuss several practical aspects of applying property-preserving encryption (PPE) to data stored in wide column stores – an encryption type that allows for secure sorting and searching on encrypted data. We present the CloudDBGuard framework that comprises implementations of several PPE schemes and takes care of the necessary metadata management. CloudDBGuard also makes progress in terms of query interface standardization by providing a unified API that supports both Apache Cassandra and Apache HBase.