I made a proof of concept of the Infor ION Grid running on CryptDB, a database that computes on encrypted data.

Fully homomorphic encryption

Let’s suppose Alice is a client that is computationally bounded, she has an input X, she wants to compute an arbitrary program P on her input X and get the result where P is computationally intensive, she wants to delegate her computation to a powerful server (e.g. cloud provider) while preserving the privacy of her input (untrusted cloud). The way to do this is to encrypt the input, do the computation on the cipher text, and output the encryption of the result. A fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an encryption scheme that achieves that. It is currently still impractical in its full form because the algorithms take exponential time, but it is generating a lot of research in both academia and the industry, and they are bringing variants that make it practical.

CryptDB

CryptDB is a practical database server that allows SQL queries on encrypted data using SQL-aware encryption schemes (e.g. deterministic encryption for joins, order-preserving encryption for comparison predicates, homomorphic encryption for sums). The threat model for CryptDB is to ensure the privacy of the data in the face of a compromise of the database server.

I learned about CryptDB during the MIT cyber security course. Microsoft Always Encrypted with SQL Server is another implementation.

Proof of concept

I made a proof of concept of the Grid running on CryptDB. I have not followed the guidelines to optimize the encryption schemes for the Grid; I just used the default CryptDB with the goal to spark interest in homomorphic encryption. The ideal would be to apply homomorphic encryption to M3.

1. Preparation

Install Ubuntu 12.04 (as required by CryptDB), Ruby, Git, and JDK 7 (minimum requirement for the Grid):

sudo apt-get install ruby git openjdk-7-jdk

2. Install CryptDB

1. Download and build CryptDB; it will take some time:

   git clone -b public git://g.csail.mit.edu/cryptdb
   cd cryptdb/cd cryptdb/
   sudo scripts/install.rb .

   

2. It will install MySQL on default port 3306; for the root password, enter CryptDB’s default letmein
3. Start the CryptDB proxy (e.g. on default port 3307; change the EDBDIR accordingly):

   export EDBDIR=/home/thibaud/cryptdb/
   cd $EDBDIR
   bins/proxy-bin/bin/mysql-proxy \
    --plugins=proxy --event-threads=4 \
    --max-open-files=1024 \
    --proxy-lua-script=$EDBDIR/mysqlproxy/wrapper.lua \
    --proxy-address=127.0.0.1:3307 \
    --proxy-backend-addresses=localhost:3306

   

3. Install the Grid

1. Install the Grid on MySQL (see part 8), but via CryptDB (i.e. port 3307 instead of 3306):

   mysql -u root -pletmein -h 127.0.0.1 -P 3307
   create database InforIONGrid;
   use InforIONGrid;
   CREATE TABLE ...

   

2. Change the Grid’s config/jdbc.properties to use CryptDB instead of MySQL (i.e. port 3307 instead of 3306):
3. Fix the CryptDB proxy query parser (it fails on column aliases and on the USER() function):

   cryptdb/mysqlproxy/wrapper.lua

   if string.find(query, "auto_increment_increment AS auto_increment_increment") then
       return -- fix for MySQL JDBC driver ConnectionImpl.loadServerVariables
   end
   if query == "SELECT USER()" then
       query = "SELECT CURRENT_USER()" -- fix for Grid Agent
   end
   

   

4. Start the Grid

Start the Grid as usual (see part 8).

Result

The result is a Grid running transparently on CryptDB, unaware that the underlying data is encrypted, while CryptDB does the computation on the encrypted data on behalf of the Grid:

The CryptDB proxy intercepts the queries (QUERY), it parses them and encrypts them (NEW QUERY), it executes them on MySQL, it decrypts the result and returns the clear text to the Grid:

Benefits

The advantages are that the Grid data is encrypted which preserves its privacy in case the database server is compromised, and the Grid application did not have to be rewritten for it.

If someone were to compromise the database server, they would only see encrypted table names and columns and encrypted data that does not reveal information about the actual data:

Potential

I hope this proof of concept inspires Infor Product Development to consider this type of security for their applications that run on the multi-tenant cloud, such as M3. Secure multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption are the future direction for the security of multi-tenant clouds and a potential market not yet realized.

That’s it!

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