Secure Data Processing in a Hybrid Cloud

Cloud computing has made it possible for a user to be able to select a computing service precisely when needed. However, certain factors such as security of data and regulatory issues will impact a user's choice of using such a service. A solution to these problems is the use of a hybrid cloud that combines a user's local computing capabilities (for mission- or organization-critical tasks) with a public cloud (for less influential tasks). We foresee three challenges that must be overcome before the adoption of a hybrid cloud approach: 1) data design: How to partition relations in a hybrid cloud? The solution to this problem must account for the sensitivity of attributes in a relation as well as the workload of a user; 2) data security: How to protect a user's data in a public cloud with encryption while enabling query processing over this encrypted data? and 3) query processing: How to execute queries efficiently over both, encrypted and unencrypted data? This paper addresses these challenges and incorporates their solutions into an add-on tool for a Hadoop and Hive based cloud computing infrastructure.
Comment: 16 pages (13 pages + 3 page appendix), 5 figures