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Shuffle Index: Efficient and Private Access to Outsourced Data

Published:16 October 2015Publication History
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Abstract

Data outsourcing and cloud computing have been emerging at an ever-growing rate as successful approaches for allowing users and companies to rely on external services for storing and managing data. As data and access to them are not under the control of the data owner, there is a clear need to provide proper confidentiality protection. Such requirements concern the confidentiality not only of the stored data (content) but also of the specific accesses (or patterns of them) that users make on such data.

In this article, we address these issues and propose an approach for guaranteeing content, access, and pattern confidentiality in a data outsourcing scenario. The proposed solution is based on the definition of a shuffle index structure, which adapts traditional B +-trees and, by applying a combination of techniques (covers, caches, and shuffling), ensures confidentiality of the data and of queries over them, protecting each single access as well as sequences thereof. The proposed solution also supports update operations over the data, while making reads and writes not recognizable as such by the server. We show that the shuffle index exhibits a limited performance cost, thus resulting effectively usable in practice.

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  1. Shuffle Index: Efficient and Private Access to Outsourced Data

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                David Gary Hill

                There exists "a clear need to provide proper confidentiality protection" to outsourced data where the data itself and access to that data is "not under the control of the data owner." Content protection through encryption alone is not sufficient confidentiality protection. Even if the data is encrypted, an external server can observe every access to physical data blocks. With possible limited other knowledge, confidentiality can be breached; for example, it is possible to "establish correlation of accesses aimed at the same item," such as different transactions on a particular stock. Not only that, but observing patterns of access to specific blocks of data could, in some cases, even "infer the plaintext order on the encrypted content of the blocks." The authors propose a solution to data confidentiality protection that addresses not only content, but also access and pattern confidentiality. That solution employs a shuffle index where the logical data "structure is dynamically reorganized at every access." Shuffling includes cover searches, which are fake searches that are executed in conjunction with the actual target. The authors feel that the performance overhead generated, which obviously depends upon specific configurations, is acceptable. The paper goes into great depth in discussing such topics as the correctness and complexity of shuffle index management, execution of range queries, and performance management. All in all, given the increased recognition of and need for true confidentiality protection, this paper should receive strong attention and review by experts in the field. Online Computing Reviews Service

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