iBigTable: practical data integrity for bigtable in public cloud

Abstract

BigTable is a distributed storage system that is designed to manage large-scale structured data. Deploying BigTable in a public cloud is an economic storage solution to small businesses and researchers who need to deal with data processing tasks over large amount of data but often lack capabilities to obtain their own powerful clusters. As one may not always trust the public cloud provider, one important security issue is to ensure the integrity of data managed by BigTable running at the cloud. In this paper, we present iBigTable, an enhancement of BigTable that provides scalable data integrity assurance. We explore the practicality of different authenticated data structure designs for BigTable, and design a set of security protocols to efficiently and flexibly verify the integrity of data returned by BigTable. More importantly, iBigtable preserves the simplicity, applicability and scalability of BigTable, so that existing applications over BigTable can interact with iBigTable seamlessly with minimum or no change of code (depending on the mode of iBigTable). We implement a prototype of iBigTable based on HBase, an open source BigTable implementation. Our experimental results show that iBigTable imposes reasonable performance overhead while providing integrity assurance.