Big Data Security Challenges and Solution of Distributed Computing in Hadoop Environment: A Security Framework

Background: In current scenario of internet, large amounts of data are generated and processed. Hadoop framework is widely used to store and process big data in a highly distributed manner. It is argued that Hadoop Framework is not mature enough to deal with the current cyberattacks on the data. Objective: The main objective of the proposed work is to provide a complete security approach comprising of authorisation and authentication for the user and the Hadoop cluster nodes and to secure the data at rest as well as in transit. Methods: The proposed algorithm uses Kerberos network authentication protocol for authorisation and authentication and to validate the users and the cluster nodes. The Ciphertext-Policy Attribute- Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is used for data at rest and data in transit. User encrypts the file with their own set of attributes and stores on Hadoop Distributed File System. Only intended users can decrypt that file with matching parameters. Results: The proposed algorithm was implemented with data sets of different sizes. The data was processed with and without encryption. The results show little difference in processing time. The performance was affected in range of 0.8% to 3.1%, which includes impact of other factors also, like system configuration, the number of parallel jobs running and virtual environment. Conclusion: The solutions available for handling the big data security problems faced in Hadoop framework are inefficient or incomplete. A complete security framework is proposed for Hadoop Environment. The solution is experimentally proven to have little effect on the performance of the system for datasets of different sizes.