Two Can Keep a Secret: A Distributed Architecture for Secure Database Services

Abstract

Recent trends towards database outsourcing, as well as concerns and laws governing data privacy, have led to great interest in enabling secure database services. Previous approaches to enabling such a service have been based on data encryption, causing a large overhead in query processing. We propose a new, distributed architecture that allows an organization to outsource its data management to {\em two} untrusted servers while preserving data privacy. We show how the presence of two servers enables efficient partitioning of data so that the contents at any one server are guaranteed not to breach data privacy. We show how to optimize and execute queries in this architecture, and discuss new challenges that emerge in designing the database schema.