CAREER: Practical Privacy for Outsourcing Systems

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). As computing becomes embedded in the very fabric of our society, theexponential growth and advances in cheap, high-speed communicationinfrastructures allow for unprecedented levels of global informationexchange and interaction. As a result, new market forces emerge that propeltoward a fundamental, cost-efficient paradigm shift in the way computing isdeployed and delivered: computing outsourcing.Outsourcing has the potential to minimize client-side management overheadsand benefit from a service provider's global expertise consolidation andbulk pricing. Companies such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Sun are rushingto offer increasingly complex storage and computation outsourcing servicessupported by globally distributed "cloud" infrastructures.Yet significant challenges lie in the path to successful large-scaleadoption. In business, healthcare and government frameworks, clients arereluctant to place sensitive data under the control of a remote, third-party provider, without practical assurances of privacy and confidentiality.Today's solutions however, do not offer such assurances, and are thusfundamentally insecure and vulnerable to illicit behavior. Existing researchaddresses several aspects of this problem, but advancing the state of theart to practical realms will require a fundamental leap.This project addresses these challenges by designing, implementing andanalyzing practical data outsourcing protocols with strong assurances ofprivacy and confidentiality. It will also l initiate the exploration of the cost and energyfootprints of outsourcing mechanisms. This is essential as the main raisond'etre of outsourcing paradigms lies in their assumed end-to-end costsavings and expertise consolidation. Yet, research has yet to explore andvalidate the magnitudes of these savings and their underlying assumptions.