Horus: Fine-Grained Encryption-Based Security for Large-Scale Storage

With the growing use of large-scale distributed systems, the likelihood that at least one node is compromised is increasing. Large-scale systems that process sensitive data such as geographic data with defense implications, drug modeling, nuclear explosion modeling, and private genomic data would benefit greatly from strong security for their storage. Nevertheless, many high performance computing (HPC), cloud, or secure content delivery network (SCDN) systems that handle such data still store them unencrypted or use simple encryption schemes, relying heavily on physical isolation to ensure confidentiality, providing little protection against compromised computers or malicious insiders. Moreover, current encryption solutions cannot efficiently provide fine-grained encryption for large datasets.