StreamShield: a stream-centric approach towards security and privacy in data stream environments

Abstract

We propose to demonstrate the StreamShield, a system designed to address the problem of security and privacy in the context of Data Stream Management Systems (DSMSs). In StreamShield, continuous access control is enforced by taking a novel "stream-centric" approach towards security. Security policies are not persistently stored on the server, but rather are depicted by security metadata, called "security punctuations", and get embedded into streams together with the data. We distinguish between two types of security punctuations: (1) the "data security punctuations" (dsps) describing the data-side security policies, and (2) the "query security punctuations" (qsps) representing the query-side security policies. The advantages of such stream-centric security model include flexibility, dynamicity and speed of enforcement. Furthermore, DSMSs can adapt to not only data-related but also to security-related selectivities, which helps reduce the waste of resources, when few subjects have access to streaming data.