Security Issues with Big Data

Joshi and Kadhiwala (2017) highlighted couple of security issues which are inherently related to big data during data transition and data storage. Confidentiality is defined as a phenomenon to restrict the illegal disclosure of data whereas integrity means protection of data against unauthorized changes or modifications (joshi & Kadhiwala, 2017).

To ensure confidentiality, cryptographic techniques are widely used by following:

1. Encryption of data during data transfer and storage in plain text format

2. Authentication procedure to control access of data

3. Storage of data in encrypted form and unencrypted data during processing or use

One such encryption scheme is referred as CPABE, that is Ciphertext policy attributed based encryption whereas authentication is ensured using access control procedure by following steps, which include system setup, key generation, data encryption and data decryption (Joshi & Khadiwala, 2017). Filters are used to ensure privacy of plain text data; however this method can still suffer from offline attack (2017).

To ensure integrity of data, several techniques can be employed like data provenance, data trustworthiness, data loss and data deduplication (Joshi & Khadiwala, 2017.

Data provenance – debugging, security and trust models are maintained from creation through transformation of data

Data trustworthiness – correlation techniques are used to assure data trustworthiness

Data loss – data loss prevention techniques are utilized to avoid data loss

Data deduplication – elimination of unnecessary copies of data reduces chances of illegal data changes but impact fault tolerance

Hadoop utilize both encryption and access control mechanisms to protect big data, by employing triple encryption in the form of HDFS file encryption using DEA, data key encryption using RSA ad then data key encryption using IDEA (Abouelmehdi, Beni-Hssane, Khaloufi & Saadi, 2016). MapReduce also make use of RSA, Rjindael, AES and RC6 encryption techniques (Abouelmehsi et al., 2016).

References:

Joshi, N. & Kadhiwala, B. (2018). Big data security and privacy issues – a survey. 2017 International conference on innovations in power and advanced computing technologies

Abouelmehdi, K., Beni-Hssane, A., Khaloufi, H. & Saadi, M. (2016). Big data emerging issues: Hadoop security and privacy. 2016 5th International Conference on Multimedia Computing and Systems.