A Security-By-Distribution Approach to Manage Big Data in a Federation of Untrustworthy Clouds

Abstract

In recent years, Cloud Computing has drastically changed IT-Architectures in enterprises throughout various branches and countries. Dynamically scalable capabilities like CPUs, storage space, virtual networks, etc. promise cost savings, as huge initial infrastructure investments are not required anymore. This development shows that Cloud Computing is also a promising technology driver for Big Data, as the storage of unstructured data when no concrete and defined data schemes (variety) can be managed with upcoming NoSQL architectures. However, in order to fully exploit these advantages, the integration of a trustworthy 3rd party public cloud provider is necessary. Thus, challenging questions concerning security, compliance, anonymization, and privacy emerge and are still unsolved. To address these challenges, this work presents, implements and evaluates a security-by-distribution approach for NoSQL document stores that distributes data across various cloud providers such that every provider only gets a small data chunk which is worthless without the others.