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We are storing and querying datasets with the private information of individuals at an unprecedented scale in settings ranging from IoT devices in smart homes to mining enormous collections of click trails for targeted advertising. Here, the privacy of the people described in these datasets is usually addressed as an afterthought, engineered on top of a DBMS optimized for performance. At best, these systems support security or managing access to sensitive data. This status quo has brought us a plethora of data breaches in the news. In response, governments are stepping in to enact privacy regulations such as the EU’s GDPR. We posit that there is an urgent need for trustworthy database system that offer end-to-end privacy guarantees for their records with user interfaces that closely resemble that of a relational database. As we shall see, these guarantees inform everything in the database’s design from how we store data to what query results we make available to untrusted clients. In this position paper we first define trustworthy database systems and put their research challenges in the context of relevant tools and techniques from the security community. We then use this backdrop to walk through the “life of a query” in a trustworthy database system. We start with the query parsing and follow the query’s path as the system plans, optimizes, and executes it. We highlight how we will need to rethink each step to make it efficient, robust, and usable for database clients.
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Practical Security and Privacy for Database Systems
Computing technology has enabled massive digital traces of our personal lives to be collected and stored. These datasets play an important role in numerous real-life applications and research analysis, such as contact tracing for COVID 19, but they contain sensitive information about individuals. When managing these datasets, privacy is usually addressed as an afterthought, engineered on top of a database system optimized for performance and usability. This has led to a plethora of unexpected privacy attacks in the news. Specialized privacy-preserving solutions usually require a group of privacy experts and they are not directly transferable to other domains. There is an urgent need for a generally trustworthy database system that offers end-to-end security and privacy guarantees. In this tutorial, we will first describe the security and privacy requirements for database systems in different settings and cover the state-of-the-art tools that achieve these requirements. We will also show challenges in integrating these techniques together and demonstrate the design principles and optimization opportunities for these security and privacy-aware database systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2016240
- PAR ID:
- 10343043
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IGMOD '21: Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Management of Data
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2839–2845
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1145/3448016.3457544
