CloudPDB: A light-weight data privacy schema for cloud-based databases

Abstract

Cloud computing paradigm offers an opportunity to in-house IT departments to establish their services on the cloud with minimum investment, and lower maintenance cost. This opportunity includes database services that allow a massive amount of data to be stored on the cloud. However, outsourcing data to the cloud may expose users' data to the cloud vendor, or the vendors' partners. Although encryption schemes, such as AES can be used against an untrusted cloud vendor, or an adversary, those schemes add additional computation overheads. In this paper, we proposed a light-weight data privacy schema for cloud based databases (CloudPDB) that scrambles data on each selected bucket (multiple records, or fields) of a database. The proposed schema uses a pre-defined database of a chaos system to store data on the cloud that protect data against an adversary inside or outside of an untrusted cloud vendor. We implemented the proposed schema on a well-known standard database benchmark, TPC-H with different query sizes. We ran several queries to assess the performance of the proposed schema. The evaluation shows that the proposed schema provides a better performance over other well-known encryption methods. In addition, we assess the security level of the proposed schema.