Steganographic database management system

Abstract

The database community is witnessing the emergence of two recent trends set on a collision course. On the one hand, the outsourcing of data management has become increasingly attractive for many organizations with the advances in the network technologies. On the other hand, escalating concerns about data privacy have sparked keen interest in enabling secure data storage and access. The two trends are indirectly conflict with each other. A client using an outsourced database service is required to trust the service provider with potentially sensitive data, leaving the door open for damaging leaks of private information. A steganographic database management system (StegDB) could support steganography in data storage and query. In particular, it grants access to a protected database partition only if the correct access key is supplied; without it, an adversary could get no information about whether the protected partition ever exists even if he understands the hardware and software completely.In this thesis, we present two different StegDB designs: 1) model 1 in which only the data storage is outsourced, and 2) model 2 in which the database server entirely expose to untrusted environment. This work is pioneering in the sense that it fills the gap between the high level security requirement and ubiquitous computing environment.