Cumulus4j: A provably secure database abstraction layer

Abstract

Cloud Computing has huge impact on IT systems. It offers advantages like flexibility and reduced costs. Privacy and security issues, however, remain a major drawback. While data can be secured against external threats using standard techniques, service providers themselves have to be trusted to ensure privacy. In this paper, we present a novel technique for secure database outsourcing. We provide the security notion Ind-ICP that focuses on hiding relations between values. We prove the security of our approach and present benchmarks showing the practicability of this solution. Furthermore, we developed a plug-in for a persistence layer. Our plug-in de-and encrypts sensitive data transparently to the client application. By using encrypted indices, queries can still be executed efficiently. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.