TrustedMR: A trusted mapreduce system based on tamper resistance hardware

Abstract

With scalability, fault tolerance, ease of programming, and flexibility, MapReduce has gained many attractions for large-scale data processing. However, despite its merits, MapReduce does not focus on the problem of data privacy, especially when processing sensitive data, such as personal data, on untrusted infrastructure. In this paper, we investigate a scenario based on the Trusted Cells paradigm : a user stores his personal data in a local secure data store and wants to process this data using MapReduce on a third party infrastructure, on which secure devices are also connected. The main contribution of the paper is to present TrustedMR, a trusted MapReduce system with high security assurance provided by tamper-resistant hardware, to enforce the security aspect of the MapReduce. Thanks to TrustedMR, encrypted data can then be processed by untrusted computing nodes without any modification to the existing MapReduce framework and code. Our evaluation shows that the performance overhead of TrustedMR is limited to few percents, compared to an original MapReduce framework that handles cleartexts.