Integrated Infrastructure for Secure and Efficient Long-Term Data Management

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

To achieve the level of security and privacy for enterprise data that is increasingly required by laws or industry standards, data should be encrypted both at rest and in transit. Yet, numerous recent privacy breaches through loss or theft of archival tapes or notebook computers show that today most data, even of extremely sensitive nature, is not encrypted. The main reason is that we do not have a flexible system for key management. Loss of the encryption key (through lapses of memory, death of staff members, or destruction of stored copies) would mean that the owner of the data would effectively lose it completely, with potentially catastrophic consequences. This project will develop a high-performance long-term data management system that will ensure the necessary levels of security throughout the lifecycle of a data set. The goal is a hierarchical cluster-based archival storage solution that will provide: (i) transparent backup, restore, and data access operations that will allow individual application programs and business entities to securely and efficiently archive data for decades; (ii) high-performance data access in a cluster computing environment; and (iii) innovative techniques for efficiently ensuring long-term data security and accessibility, including long-term key management. The solution will be suitable for heterogeneous computing environments, including the extremely high-throughput ones of the high-performance computing (HPC) community.