Two Can Keep a Secret: A Distributed Architecture for Secure Database Services

  • Krishnaram Kenthapadi

CIDR |

Recent trends towards database outsourcing,
as well as concerns and laws governing data
privacy, have led to great interest in enabling
secure database services. Previous approaches
to enabling such a service have been based
on data encryption, causing a large overhead
in query processing. We propose a new, dis-
tributed architecture that allows an organiza-
tion to outsource its data management to two
untrusted servers while preserving data pri-
vacy. We show how the presence of two servers
enables e cient partitioning of data so that
the contents at any one server are guaranteed
not to breach data privacy. We show how to
optimize and execute queries in this architec-
ture, and discuss new challenges that emerge
in designing the database schema.