Supporting concurrency in private data outsourcing

With outsourcing emerging as a successful paradigm for delegating data and service management to third parties, the problem of guaranteeing proper privacy protection against the external server is becoming more and more important. Recent promising solutions for ensuring privacy in such scenarios rely on the use of encryption and on the dynamic allocation of encrypted data to memory blocks for destroying the otherwise static relationship between data and blocks in which they are stored. However, dynamic data allocation implies the need to re-write blocks at every read access, thus requesting exclusive locks that can affect concurrency. In this paper we present an approach that provides support for concurrent accesses to dynamically allocated encrypted data. Our solution relies on the use of multiple differential versions of the data index that are periodically reconciled and applied to the main data structure. We show how the use of such differential versions guarantees privacy while effectively supporting concurrent accesses thus considerably increasing the performance of the system.