NSF funds trusted computing project at Stony Brook University

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Computer Science Professor Radu Sion in collaboration with Professors Marianne Winslett from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and Richard T. Snodgrass from the University of Arizona, was awarded $870,000 to develop secure regulatory compliant data management systems for financial, healthcare and govermental sectors.

Dr. Radu Sion

Through the Information Privacy and Security thrust of the Information and Intelligent Systems program, the NSF has awarded $870,000 to Stony Brook, UIUC and U. Arizona to support a project titled "III-COR Medium: Collaborative Research: Achieving Compliant Databases".

Spurred by financial scandals and privacy concerns, governments worldwide have moved to ensure confidence in digital records by regulating their retention and deletion. These new requirements have led to a huge market for compliance storage servers, which guarantee that data are not overwritten before the end of their mandatory retention period. These servers are intended for preserving unstructured and semi-structured data at a file-level granularity.email, spreadsheets, reports, instant messages.

Extending this level of protection to the vast amounts of structured data residing in databases is an extremely difficult open research problem: the write-once nature of compliance devices makes them very resistant to the insider attacks at the heart of compliance regulations, but also makes it very hard to lay out, update, index, query, and (eventually) delete database records efficiently.

This project meets this challenge by developing and exploring regulatory compliant DBMS architectures.