Award Abstract #0845192
CAREER: Practical Privacy for Outsourcing Systems

NSF Org:	CNS Division of Computer and Network Systems
Initial Amendment Date:	September 10, 2009
Latest Amendment Date:	September 10, 2009
Award Number:	0845192
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	Karl N. Levitt CNS Division of Computer and Network Systems CSE Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering
Start Date:	September 15, 2009
Expires:	August 31, 2014 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$400000
Investigator(s):	Radu Sion sion@cs.stonybrook.edu (Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	SUNY at Stony Brook WEST 5510 FRK MEL LIB STONY BROOK, NY 11794 631/632-9949
NSF Program(s):	SOFTWARE ENG & FORMAL METHODS, TRUSTWORTHY COMPUTING, INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARC
Field Application(s):
Program Reference Code(s):	HPCC, 9218, 6890, 1187, 1045
Program Element Code(s):	7944, 7795, 1640

ABSTRACT

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

As computing becomes embedded in the very fabric of our society, the

exponential growth and advances in cheap, high-speed communication

infrastructures allow for unprecedented levels of global information

exchange and interaction. As a result, new market forces emerge that propel

toward a fundamental, cost-efficient paradigm shift in the way computing is

deployed and delivered: computing outsourcing.

Outsourcing has the potential to minimize client-side management overheads

and benefit from a service provider's global expertise consolidation and

bulk pricing. Companies such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Sun are rushing

to offer increasingly complex storage and computation outsourcing services

supported by globally distributed "cloud" infrastructures.

Yet significant challenges lie in the path to successful large-scale

adoption. In business, healthcare and government frameworks, clients are

reluctant to place sensitive data under the control of a remote, third-

party provider, without practical assurances of privacy and confidentiality.

Today's solutions however, do not offer such assurances, and are thus

fundamentally insecure and vulnerable to illicit behavior. Existing research

addresses several aspects of this problem, but advancing the state of the

art to practical realms will require a fundamental leap.

This project addresses these challenges by designing, implementing and

analyzing practical data outsourcing protocols with strong assurances of

privacy and confidentiality. It will also l initiate the exploration of the cost and energy

footprints of outsourcing mechanisms. This is essential as the main raison

d'etre of outsourcing paradigms lies in their assumed end-to-end cost

savings and expertise consolidation. Yet, research has yet to explore and

validate the magnitudes of these savings and their underlying assumptions.

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