MILo-DB: a personal, secure and portable database machine

Abstract

Mass-storage secure portable tokens are emerging and provide a real breakthrough in the management of sensitive data. They can embed personal data and/or metadata referencing documents stored encrypted in the Cloud and can manage them under holder’s control. Mass on-board storage requires efficient embedded database techniques. These techniques are however very challenging to design due to a combination of conflicting NAND Flash constraints and scarce RAM constraint, disqualifying known state of the art solutions. To tackle this challenge, we proposes a log-only based storage organization and an appropriate indexing scheme, which (1) produce only sequential writes compatible with the Flash constraints and (2) consume a tiny amount of RAM, independent of the database size. We show the effectiveness of this approach through a comprehensive performance study.