Distributing data for secure database services

Abstract

The advent of database services has resulted in privacy concerns on the part of the client storing data with third party database service providers. Previous approaches to enabling such a service have been based on data encryption, causing a large overhead in query processing. A distributed architecture for secure database services is proposed as a solution to this problem where data is stored at multiple servers. The distributed architecture provides both privacy as well as fault tolerance to the client. In this paper we provide algorithms for (1) distributing data: our results include hardness of approximation results and hence a heuristic greedy algorithm for the distribution problem (2) partitioning the query at the client to queries for the servers is done by a bottom up state based algorithm. Finally the results at the servers are integrated to obtain the answer at the client. We provide an experimental validation and performance study of our algorithms.