BigSecret
=========

This source code is the result of an accepted IEEE Cloud 2013 paper:
  BigSecret: A Secure Data Management Framework for Key-Value Stores

This project aims to secure outsourcing of Key-Value stores, simply by utilizing public 
clouds through a proxy application. this proxy application recieves incoming requests from
any client, and performs simple, fast, but secure cryptographic operations on the data. Then,
resulting data is stored/retrieved on/from public clouds. 

To store data in secure form, and perform queries (Put, Get, Delete, and Scan in HBase terms),
data needs to be transformed using fundamental crypto techniques, such as symmetric encryption,
hashing, and bucketization. There are three modes of storage in BigSecret:
  1 - Bucketization is the primary indexing tool. When data is stored in this mode, all four 
    operations of HBase can be performed. However, this comes with a cost of reduced efficiency.
  2 - Hashing is the indexing technique, which is applied to every key-part (row-key, family, 
    qualifier, and timestamp). This mode of operation is fast, but does not support Scan. 
  3 - Again, hashing is the indexing technique, but only applied to row-key. Moreover, all key
    related data is concatenated in the qualifier part in encrypted form. In our paper, we prove
	the security of this mode. Just like the 2nd mode, operations are performed very efficiently.
	
In our paper, we utilize multiple clouds by partitioning an initial dataset, and a possible set of
queries. However, this feature is not included in the open source implementation of BigSecret. The 
code that handles the partitioning is in prototype level, and needs further improvement to be used 
in this version. 
  
Further information about BigSecret can be found in:
  . Technical report @ http://www.utdallas.edu/~exp111430/techReport.pdf
  . Course notes @ http://www.utdallas.edu/~muratk/courses/cloud13s_files/bigsecret.pdf
  . IEEE Cloud 2013 presentation http://www.utdallas.edu/~exp111430/bigsecret/presentation.pptx
	
To start working with BigSecret library:
  1 - Install HBase. Current version of BigSecret was written on top of HBase 0.94.2.
  2 - If you want to use bucketizers in your data storage, then:
    a - Run Bucketizer/src/edu/utdallas/bigsecret/app/CreateBuckets. You may create as many 
      bucketizers as you need. Remember the id's that you give to the bucketizers. 
      A sample code for creating bucketizers through Java is present in 
      Proxy/src/edu/utdallas/bigsecret/proxy/test/TestProxyMode1.java
  3 - Place bucketizer.jar, cipher.jar, proxy.jar, utilities.jar to your class path. You also 
    need to have HBase related jars in your class path.
  4 - You're all set. Now you can start using BigSecret library. 
    You can find example implementations in 
    Proxy/src/edu/utdallas/bigsecret/proxy/test/TestProxyMode(1|2|3).java