GhostDB: Hiding Data from Prying Eyes

Imagine that you have been entrusted with private data, such as corporate product information, sensitive government information, or symptom and treatment information about hospital patients. You may want to issue queries whose result will combine private and public data, but private data must not be revealed, say, to the prying eyes of some insurance fraudster. GhostDB is an architecture and system to achieve this. You carry private data in a smart USB device (a large Flash persistent store combined with a tamper and snoop-resistant CPU and small RAM). When the key is plugged in, you can issue queries that link private and public data and be sure that the only information revealed to a potential spy is which queries you pose and the public data you access. Queries linking public and private data entail novel distributed processing techniques on extremely unequal devices (standard computer and smart USB device) in which data flows in only one direction: from public to private. This dem...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: VLDB
• Authors: Christophe Salperwyck, Nicolas Anciaux, Mehdi Benzine, Luc Bouganim, Philippe Pucheral, Dennis Shasha
• Keywords: Database, Private Data, Public Data, Smart Usb Device, VLDB 2007