Dynamic and Scalable Enforcement of Access Control Policies for Big Data

The conflict between the need of protecting and sharing data is hampering the spread of big data applications. Security and privacy assurance is required to protect data owners, while data access and sharing are fundamental to implement smart big data solutions. In this context, access control systems can assume a central role in balancing data protection and data sharing. However, existing access control solutions are not general and scalable enough to address the software and technological complexity of big data ecosystems, being unable to support such a dynamic and collaborative environment. In this paper, we propose an access control system that enforces access to data in a distributed, multi-party big data environment. It is based on data annotations and secure data transformations performed at ingestion time. We show the feasibility of our approach in the smart city domain using an Apache-based big data engine.