Access Control and Storage of Distributed IoT Data

Abstract

There has been a growth of a class of databases known as the Not only SQL (NoSQL) databases in recent years. Its quick growth has been fueled by a high demand by businesses as it offers a convenient way to store data and is significantly different from our traditional relational databases. It is easy to process unstructured data, offers a cloud-friendly ap- proach and grows through the distribution of data over lots of commodity computers. Most of these NoSQL databases are distributed in several different locations, spanning countries and are known as geo-distributed cloud datastores. We work to customize one of these known as Cassandra. Given the size of the database and the size of applications accessing the data stored, it has been challenging to customize it to meet existing application Service Level Agreement (SLAs). We live in an era of data breaches and even though some types of information are stripped of all sensitive data, there are ways to easily identify and link it to data of real persons or government. Data saved in different countries are subject to the rules and regulations of that specific country and security measures employed to safeguard consumer data. In this thesis, we describe mechanisms for selectively replicating data in a large scale NoSQL datastore in respect of privacy and legal regulations. We introduce an easily extensible constraint language to implement these policy constraints through the creation of a pluggable topology provider in the configuration files of Cassandra. Experiments using the modified Cassandra trunk demonstrate that our techniques work well, respect response times and improves read and write latencies.