CSA Seeks Input For Open Peer Review: Expanded Top Ten Big Data Security and Privacy Challenges Report

Big Data seems to be on the lips of every organization’s CXO these days. By exploiting Big Data, enterprises are able to gain valuable new insights into customer behavior via advanced analytics. However, what often gets lost amidst all the excitement are the very real and many security and privacy issues that go hand in hand with Big Data. Traditional security schemes mechanisms were simply never designed to deal with the reality of Big Data, which often relies on distributed, large-scale cloud infrastructures, a diversity of data sources, and the high volume and frequency of data migration between different cloud environments. To address these challenges, the CSA Big Data Working Group released an initial report, The Top 10 Big Data Security and Privacy Challenges at CSA Congress 2012, It was the first such industry report to take a holistic view at the wide variety of big data challenges facing enterprises. Since this time, the group has been working to further its research, assembling detailed information and use cases for each threat. The result is the expanded Top Ten Big Data Security and Privacy Challenges report and, beginning today, the report is open for peer review during which CSA members are invited to review and comment on the report prior to its final release. The 35-page report outlines the unique challenges presented by Big Data through narrative use cases and identifies the dimension of difficulty for each challenge. The Top 10 Big Data Security and Privacy Challenges have been enumerated as follows:

1. Secure computations in distributed programming frameworks
2. Security best practices for non-relational data stores
3. Secure data storage and transactions logs
4. End-point input validation/filtering
5. Real-time security monitoring
6. Scalable and composable privacy-preserving data mining and analytics
7. Cryptographically enforced data centric security
8. Granular access control
9. Granular audits
10. Data provenance

The goal of outlining these challenges is to raise awareness among security practitioners and researchers so that industry wide best practices might be adopted to addresses these issues as they continue to evolve. The open review period ends March 18, 2013. To review the report and provide comments, please visit https://interact.cloudsecurityalliance.org/index.php/bigdata/top_ten_big_data_2013 .