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Article
Masking Page Reference Patterns in Encryption Databases on Untrusted Storage
Data and Knowledge Engineering
  • Xi MA, National University of Singapore
  • Hwee Hwa PANG, Singapore Management University
  • Kian-Lee TAN, National University of Singapore
Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
9-2006
Abstract

To support ubiquitous computing, the underlying data have to be persistent and available anywhere-anytime. The data thus have to migrate from devices that are local to individual computers, to shared storage volumes that are accessible over open network. This potentially exposes the data to heightened security risks. In particular, the activity on a database exhibits regular page reference patterns that could help attackers learn logical links among physical pages and then launch additional attacks. We propose two countermeasures to mitigate the risk of attacks initiated through analyzing the shared storage server’s activity for those page patterns. The first countermeasure relocates data pages according to which page sequences they are in. The second countermeasure enhances the first by randomly prefetching pages from predicted page sequences. We have implemented the two countermeasures in MySQL, and experiment results demonstrate their effectiveness and practicality.

Keywords
  • Page reference patterns,
  • Plausible deniability,
  • Traffic analysis,
  • Pattern mining
Identifier
10.1016/j.datak.2005.06.003
Publisher
Elsevier
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International
Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2005.06.003
Citation Information
Xi MA, Hwee Hwa PANG and Kian-Lee TAN. "Masking Page Reference Patterns in Encryption Databases on Untrusted Storage" Data and Knowledge Engineering Vol. 58 Iss. 3 (2006) p. 466 - 483 ISSN: 0169-023X
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/hweehwa-pang/47/