SECERN: A Secure Enterprise Backup and Recovery System for Mission-Critical Relational Database Servers

In this paper we present SECERN, a secure enterprise backup and recovery system for mission-critical relational database servers. SECERN operates on the database server side to secure the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of local (onsite) and remote (offsite) database backups. It secures backup data based on content and sensitivity and highly surpasses the performance of bulk encryption protocols such as the secure socket layer (SSL) protocol and the transport layer security (TLS) protocol by utilizing a customizable, policy-based security architecture. This policy-based architecture provides efficient and optimized security algorithms and components and makes use of the relational structure of database objects to provide flexible, multi-level, and fine-grained encryption and hashing methodologies. SECERN main contribution resides in its ability to categorize database object records in configurable security classes and domains and to precisely grant the appropriate cryptographic specifications and procedures to these security domains. The encryption and hashing operations are designed to target the field level in the database backup object. Moreover, SECERNs security policy can be configured to hit the byte-level granularity in securing individual database fields. This makes SECERN a very efficient choice for operation on mission-critical relational database servers with strict performance requirements