Towards Virtual Private NoSQL datastores

Many modern applications use context related information to provide highly personalized services, and use NoSQL databases for data management, as these systems show outstanding performance and support high volumes of data. However, NoSQL databases integrate poor data protection features with basic coarse grained access control and no support for context aware policies. Therefore, we believe that a general approach is required to enhance NoSQL datastores with fine grained context aware access control. In this paper, we start to fill this void by targeting MongoDB, a very popular datastore. The contribution is twofold. We enhance MongoDB's access control model with advanced features and we define an enforcement monitor for the proposed enhanced model, which can be straightforwardly used in any MongoDB deployment. Technological limitations of MongoDB do not allow implementing the same efficient enforcement mechanism for all query types. As a consequence, experimental results show an enforcement overhead that is significant for aggregate queries, which contrasts with a low overhead measured for find and map-reduce queries.