StealthyCRM: A Secure Cloud CRM System Application that Supports Fully Homomorphic Database Encryption

Abstract

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system improves companies' profitability by helping companies focus on the relationships with customers, colleagues or suppliers. By having strong initiative to move applications to cloud, enterprises are hindered by cloud security and reliability issues [1], especially when it comes to financial industries. To provide a practical and secure solution to these enterprises, this project aims to build a cloud CRM system that enables fully homomorphic encryption. In order to explore the potential of this, the project integrates three key components: Open source CRM system Sugar CRM, partial homomorphic database system Crypt DB and fully homomorphic encryption library HElib. By leveraging the structure based on our previous work [2], Stealthy CRM successfully integrates fully homomorphic encryption support on top of Crypt DB database encryption environment. Besides that, Stealthy CRM enables a transparent and seamless integration to any CRM system by using a modified My SQL proxy to listen to, encrypt the queries and interact with Crypt DB and HElib subsystems. An evaluation of TPC-C and TPC-H queries is conducted on Stealthy CRM system. The result shows Stealthy CRM has 14%-28% throughput overhead for most of the CRM queries, compared with unmodified My SQL server. For complex TPC-H queries involving multiplication and composition of computation, Stealthy CRM is able to execute the query between 1.75 min to 11.7 min. Although the time takes to complete a fully homomorphic query in CRM system is still long, Stealthy CRM provided a prototype for researchers and other business application developers to explore the potential.