Simultaneous scalability and security for data-intensive web applications

For Web applications in which the database component is the bottleneck, scalability can be provided by a third-party Database Scalability Service Provider (DSSP) that caches application data and supplies query answers on behalf of the application. Cost-effective DSSPs will need to cache data from many applications, inevitably raising concerns about security. However, if all data passing through a DSSP is encrypted to enhance security, then data updates trigger invalidation of large regions of cache. Consequently, achieving good scalability becomes virtually impossible. There is a tradeoff between security and scalability, which requires careful consideration. In this paper we study the security-scalability tradeoff, both formally and empirically. We begin by providing a method for statically identifying segments of the database that can be encrypted without impacting scalability. Experiments over a prototype DSSP system show the effectiveness of our static analysis method-for all thre...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SIGMOD
• Authors: Amit Manjhi, Anastassia Ailamaki, Bruce M. Maggs, Todd C. Mowry, Christopher Olston, Anthony Tomasic
• Keywords: Data Updates Trigger, Database, Encryption Impacts Scalability, SIGMOD 2006, Third-party Database Scalability