With the advent of the world wide web and the resulting technologies such as social media, smart phones and sensor networks, the amount of data being collected has increased tremendously in recent years. Managing, storing, processing, analyzing and disseminating such massive amounts of data gives raise to many security and privacy challenges. To address these security and privacy challenges of managing and analyzing big data, an NSF Workshop on Big Data Security and Privacy has been proposed. Specifically, the workshop explores research topics including: policy management for big data; security and privacy for big data management and analytics; secure infrastructures and secure storage for big data; securing and analyzing massive networks; and big data analytics for security problems. The workshop participants are expected to be from academia, industry and government labs, consisting of interdisciplinary researchers in the fields of higher performance computing, systems, data management and analytics, cyber security, network science and policy and social sciences. They will come together and determine the strategic direction for big data security and privacy. Since research in big data security and privacy is of growing importance, this workshop is expected to have very high broader impacts.
Recently a few workshops and panels have been held on Big Data Security and Privacy. Examples include the ACM CCS workshop on Big Data Security, ACM SACMAT and IEEE Big Data Conference panels. These workshops and panels have been influenced by different communities of researchers. For example, the ACM CCS workshop series is focusing on Big Data for security applications while the IEEE Big Data Conference is focusing on cloud security issues. Furthermore, these workshops and panels mainly address a limited number of the technical issues surrounding big data security and privacy. For example, the ACM CCS workshop does not appear to address the privacy issues dealing with regulations or the security violations resulting from data analytics. To address the above limitations, we organized a workshop on Big Data Security and Privacy on September 16-17, 2014 in Dallas, Texas sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) [1]. The participants of this workshop consisted of interdisciplinary researchers in the fields of higher performance computing, systems, data management and analytics, cyber security, network science, healthcare, and social sciences who came together and determined the strategic direction for Big Data security and privacy. NSF has made substantial investments both in cyber security and big data. It is therefore critical that the two areas work together to determine the direction for big data security. We made a submission based on the workshop results to the National Privacy Research Strategy [2]. We also gave a presentation at the NITRD (The Networking and Information Technology Research and Development) Privacy Workshop [3]. This document is the workshop report that describes the issues in Big Data security and privacy, presentations at the workshop and the discussions at the workshop. We hope that this effort will help toward building a community in Big Data security and privacy. The organization of this report is as follows. Section 2 describes the issues surrounding Big Data security and privacy. The workshop participants were given these issues to build upon during the workshop discussions. A summary of the workshop presentations is provided in Section 3. A summary of the discussions at the workshop is provided in Section 4. We submitted a version of this summary to the National Privacy Research Strategy [2]. Next steps are discussed in Section 5. We have supplemented this report with three appendices. The workshop agenda is provided in Appendix A. The list of workshop participants is provided in Appendix B. Links to the presentations given at this workshop as well as the position papers submitted are provided in Appendix C. References [1] http://csi.utdallas.edu/events/NSF/NSF%20workshop%202014.htm [2] www.nitrd.gov/cybersecurity/nprsrfi102014/BigData-SP.pdf [3] http://csi.utdallas.edu/events/NSF/NPRS%20Workshop%20Presentation.pdf
