Evaluation of Container Overlays for Secure Data Sharing

Abstract

There are many organizations interested in sharing data with others, and they can do this only if a secure platform is available. Such platforms, often referred to as Digital Data Marketplaces (DDMs), require that all of the transactions follow the agreements which are established by the participating organizations. However, translating high-level sharing policies and setting up such an infrastructure is still a big challenge.Our work shows that containers and overlay networks can be deployed to construct a sharing platform considering security and performance aspects. We introduce an architecture for handling sharing requests in a container-based platform with focusing on improving security. We define three container connectivity: Overlay per DDM, Overlay per request, and Overlay per group. Our security analysis shows that the method "Overlay per request" is more secure against cross-container attacks. In terms of the time taken to complete the sharing requests, the difference between methods is small.