Privacy-aware Databases

3/21/2018

By Rogério Pontes, HASLab, INESC TEC & UMinho.

Abstract. Individual data privacy, though understood as a fundamental right, is commonly overlooked in our daily use of mobile, web and desktop applications. Each bit of information generated and exchanged by application’s users is stored and analysed for corporate gains in centralised Cloud infrastructures, often at the expense of user’s control over its own personal data. Privacy-aware databases aim to address this issue by protecting the user’s confidentiality from the moment data is stored on the system until query results are returned to the clients. In this talk, I’m presenting an overview of the current state of the art on privacy-aware database systems, the basic principles on how privacy-aware databases work and how they have failed to effectively protect data. Afterwards, I will present how we are bringing these concepts to NoSQL databases and pushing the existing boundaries of privacy-aware databases by exploring new alternatives such as Multi-party protocols and trusted hardware (Intel SGX).

Keywords. Distributed Systems, Databases, Cryptography, Encryption, Multi-party, SGX.

About the Speaker. Rogério Pontes is currently a PhD candidate at MAP-I and research assistant at HASLab, INESC TEC & UMinho. His thesis work, supervised by Manuel Barbosa and Ricardo Vilaça, is focused on data privacy in Clouds, mainly within the SafeCloud EU H2020 project. In particular, his research aims to propose novel privacy-aware databases and assess how they compare with current enterprise database systems. Prior to his PhD, Rogério worked on a Linear Algebra Approach to OLAP systems, during his Master’s thesis, and he got the opportunity to work a variety of topics, novel theoretical models of analytical databases, full stack development of social networks, and automatic cloud deployments in collaboration with the industry. Rogério has been involved in several projects like SafeCloud, OSSaaS, and FalarSobreCancro.org, and has published several papers on security and privacy in databases. Rogério is enthusiastic to his research work on privacy being a hot topic that is full of challenges and tackles a major human concern..