Cryptographically enforced role-based access control for NoSQL distributed databases

Abstract

The support for Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) using cryptography for NOSQL distributed databases is investigated. Cassandra is a NoSQL DBMS that efficiently supports very large databases, but provides rather simple security measures (an agent having physical access to a Cassandra cluster is usually assumed to have access to all data therein). Support for RBAC had been added almost as an afterthought, with the Node Coordinator having to mediate all requests to read and write data, in order to ensure that only the requests allowed by the Access Control Policy (ACP) are allowed through. In this paper, we propose a model and protocols for cryptographic enforcement of an ACP in a cassandra like system, which would ease the load on the Node Coordinator, thereby taking the bottleneck out of the existing security implementation. We allow any client to read the data from any storage node(s) – provided that only the clients whom the ACP grants access to a datum, would hold the encryption keys that enable these clients to decrypt the data.