SecureStreams: A Reactive Middleware Framework for Secure Data Stream Processing

TL;DR

SecureStreams is a reactive middleware framework that combines dataflow programming with Intel SGX to enable secure, high-throughput data stream processing at scale in distributed environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel middleware framework integrating reactive programming with hardware-based security for scalable secure data stream processing.

Findings

High processing throughput achieved

Secure streams implemented with minimal code

Effective integration of reactive programming and SGX

Abstract

The growing adoption of distributed data processing frameworks in a wide diversity of application domains challenges end-to-end integration of properties like security, in particular when considering deployments in the context of large-scale clusters or multi-tenant Cloud infrastructures. This paper therefore introduces SecureStreams, a reactive middleware framework to deploy and process secure streams at scale. Its design combines the high-level reactive dataflow programming paradigm with Intel's low-level software guard extensions (SGX) in order to guarantee privacy and integrity of the processed data. The experimental results of SecureStreams are promising: while offering a fluent scripting language based on Lua, our middleware delivers high processing throughput, thus enabling developers to implement secure processing pipelines in just few lines of code.