Security Mechanisms in NoSQL DBMS’s: A Technical Review

Abstract

The exponential growth of data in organizations, together with the success reported by large companies such as Facebook, Google or Twitter, has promoted to the migration of a large number of applications to the use of NoSQL databases, due to their scalability and performance to Big Data solutions. This phenomenon evidence the need to analyze these new databases from the information security point of view. This article presents a technical review of the controls that could be implemented to preserve security data in eight of the most used NoSQL Database Management Systems named MongoDB, Cassandra, Hbase, CouchDB, BigTable, DinamoDb, Neo4j, and GraphBD. Analysis is performed from the security mechanisms point of view, i.e, authentication, authorization, and encryption (in transit and at rest).