Confidentiality enforcement for XML outsourced data

Abstract

Data outsourcing is today receiving growing attention due to its benefits in terms of cost reduction and better services. According to such paradigm, the data owner is no more responsible for data management, rather it outsources its data to one or more service providers (referred to as publishers) that provide management services and query processing functionalities. Clearly, data outsourcing leads to challenging security issues in that, by outsourcing its data, the data owner may potentially loose control over them. Therefore, a lot of research is currently carrying on to ensure secure management of data even in the presence of an untrusted publisher. One of the key issues is confidentiality enforcement, that is, how to ensure that data are not read by unauthorized users. In this paper, we propose a solution for XML data, which exploits cryptographic techniques and it is robust to the most common and relevant security threats. In the paper, we present the encryption methods and query processing strategies. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.