How to build a trusted database system on untrusted storage

Some emerging applications require programs to maintain sensitive state on untrusted hosts. This paper presents the architecture and implementation of a trusted database system, TDB, which leverages a small amount of trusted storage to protect a scalable amount of untrusted storage. The database is encrypted and validated against a collision-resistant hash kept in trusted storage, so untrusted programs cannot read the database or modify it undetectably. TDB integrates encryption and hashing with a low-level data model, which protects data and metadata uniformly, unlike systems built on top of a conventional database system. The implementation exploits synergies between hashing and log-structured storage. Preliminary performance results show that TDB outperforms an off-the-shelf embedded database system, thus supporting the suitability of the TDB architecture.