Abstract
Security and privacy issues are magnified by the volume, variety, and velocity of Big Data, such as Large-scale cloud infrastructures, diversity of data sources and formats, the streaming nature of data acquisition and high volume inter-cloud migration. In the past, Big Data was limited to very large organizations such as governments and large enterprises that could afford to create and own the infrastructure necessary for hosting and mining large amounts of data. These infrastructures were typically proprietary and were isolated from general networks. Today, Big Data is cheaply and easily accessible to organizations large and small through public cloud infrastructure. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the Big Data security and privacy challenges and also presents some solutions for these challenges, but it does not provide a definitive solution for the problem. It rather points to some directions and technologies that might contribute to solve some of the most relevant and challenging Big Data security and privacy issues.
TopBackground
Today we are living in an era of digital world. With the rapid increase in digitization the amount of structured, semi structured and unstructured data being generated and stored is exploding. Usama Fayyad (2012) has presented amazing data numbers about internet usage like “every day 1 billion queries are there in Google, more than 250 million tweets are there in Twitter, more than 800 million updates are there in Face book, and more than 4 billion views are there in You tube”. Each day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated and 90 percent of the data in the world today were created within the past two years. The data produced nowadays is estimated in the order of zeta bytes, and it is growing around 40% every year. International Data Corporation (IDC) terms this as the “Digital Universe” and predicts that this digital universe is set to explode to an unimaginable 8 Zetabytes by the year 2015. The above examples demonstrate the rise of big data applications where data collection has grown tremendously and is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to manage, capture, and process.
From a privacy and security perspective, the challenge is to ensure that data subjects (i.e., individuals) have sustainable control over their data, to prevent misuse and abuse by data controllers (i.e., big data holders and other third parties), while preserving data utility, i.e., the value of big data for knowledge/ patterns discovery, innovation and economic growth.
Cloud protection alliance big data working group identify top protection and seclusion problems that need to confine for making the big data computing and infrastructure more secure. Most of these issues are linked to the big data storage and computation. There having some challenges which are related to secure data storage (Cloud Security Alliance White paper, 2012). Different security challenges related to data security and privacy are discussed in (A. A. Soofi et al., 2014) which include data breaches, data reliability, data accessibility and data support. Privacy is major concern in outsourced data. Recently, some controversies have revealed how some security agencies are using data generated by individuals for their own benefits without permission. Therefore, policies that cover all user privacy concerns should be developed. Furthermore, rule violators should be identified and user data should not be misused or leaked. The following sections describe some relevant challenges to security and privacy in the context of big data.
Key Terms in this Chapter
SIEM: Security information and event management system may collect event logs from millions of hardware devices and software applications in an enterprise network.
Distributed Programming Frameworks: It utilize parallel computation and storage to process massive amounts of data.
CSA: Cloud Secure Alliance, a non-profit organization with a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing, has created a Big Data Working Group that has focused on the major challenges to implement secure Big Data services.
IDC: International Data Corporation terms this as the “Digital Universe” and predicts that this digital universe is set to explode to an unimaginable 8 Zetabytes by the year 2015.
Implementation: Implementing the solution in existing infrastructures.
Analysis: Finding tractable solutions based on the threat model.
Big Data: Big data is a conventional term used to describe the exponential increase and accessibility of structured and unstructured data.