Compliant Systems
@ MPI-SWS

Overview

Today's data processing systems are expected to comply with many data usage policies, including the provider's privacy policy, customer requirements, contractual obligations, and legal requirements in different jurisductions. Ensuring compliance with all applicable policies is a major challenge for providers, considering the inevitable bugs and misconfigurations in a vast and evolving application codebase, as well as errors and misteps by individual employees in a large organization.

In this project, we seek to enable compliant data processing systems, where

policies are stated in a rich, declarative language separate from application code,
compliance is guaranteed with low runtime overhead by a small reference monitor, and
application code is removed entirely from the trusted computing base.

Towards this end, we have developed a set of complementary techniques to ensure compliance at different layers:

Guardat: Policy compliance at the storage layer

Guardat enforces rich data access policies at the storage layer. Users, developers and administrators specify file protection policies declaratively, concisely and separate from code, and Guardat enforces these policies by mediating I/O in the storage layer. Compliance relies only on the integrity of the Guardat reference monitor and any external policy dependencies.

Guardat: Enforcing data policies at the storage layer [pdf]
Anjo Vahldiek, Eslam Elnikety, Aastha Mehta, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel, Ansley Post, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Johannes Gehrke. In the proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys'15), Bordeaux, France, April 2015.
Guardat: A foundation for policy-protected data [pdf]
Anjo Vahldiek, Eslam Elnikety, Aastha Mehta, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel, Ansley Post, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Johannes Gehrke. Technical Report 2014-002, MPI-SWS, 2014
Trusted Storage [PDF] [Poster]
Anjo Vahldiek, Eslam Elnikety, Ansley Post, Peter Druschel, Rodrigo Rodrigues, Johannes Gehrke.
Work in Progress/Poster USENIX FAST'12, February 2012
Protecting Data Integrity with Storage Leases [pdf]
Anjo Vahldiek, Eslam Elnikety, Ansley Post, Peter Druschel, Rodrigo Rodrigues.
Technical Report 2011-008, MPI-SWS, 2011

Thoth: Compliant data retrieval systems

Thoth provides an efficient, kernel-level compliance layer for distributed data retrieval systems. Declarative policies are attached to the systems’ input and output files, key-value tuples, and network connections, and specify the data’s integrity and confidentiality requirements. Thoth tracks the flow of data through the system and enforces policy at process boundaries.

Thoth: Comprehensive Policy Compliance in Data Retrieval Systems [pdf]
Eslam Elnikety, Aastha Mehta, Anjo Vahldiek-Oberwagner, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel.

In the proceedings of the 25th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'16), Austin, Aug. 2016.
Thoth: Efficiently Enforcing Data Confidentiality and Integrity in Data Retrieval Systems [abstract] [poster]
Eslam Elnikety, Anjo Vahldiek, Aastha Mehta, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel
Work in Progress/Poster ACM SOSP'13, November 2013.

Qapla: Policy compliant database queries

Database queries are often subject to complex column and row access control, and depend on query operators like aggregation, group by, and join. Qapla enforces policy-compliant queries without relying on application code and independently of the underlying DBMS system. Qapla intercepts application queries in the database adapter and rewrites queries according to applicable policies.

Qapla: Policy compliance for database-backed systems [pdf]
Aastha Mehta, Eslam Elnikety, Katura Harvey, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel.

In the proceedings of the 26th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security'17), Vancouver, Aug. 2017
Qapla: Ensuring policy compliance in database-backed systems [abstract] [poster]
Aastha Mehta, Eslam Elnikety, Deepak Garg, Peter Druschel.

Poster ACM SOSP'15, October 2015.

Members

Faculty

Deepak Garg
Peter Druschel
Rodrigo Rodrigues (IST Lisboa)
Johannes Gehrke (Cornell/Microsoft)
Ansley Post (Google)

Students

Funding

This project is supported by the German Science Foundation (DFG CRC 1223), the European Research Council (imPACT Synergy project), and a Google Faculty Research Award.

Imprint-Dataprotection

Compliant Systems @ MPI-SWS