Big data workflow management systems (BDWMS)s have recently emerged as popular data analytics platforms to conduct large-scale data analytics in the cloud. However, the protection of data confidentiality and secure execution of workflow applications remains an important and challenging problem. Although a few data analytics systems, such as VC3 and Opaque, were developed to address security problems, they are limited to specific domains such as Map-Reduce-style and SQL query workflows. A generic secure framework for BDWMSs is still missing. In this article, we propose SecDATAVIEW, a distributed BDWMS that employs heterogeneous workers, such as Intel SGX and AMD SEV, to protect both workflow and workflow data execution, addressing three major security challenges: (1) Reducing the TCB size of the big data workflow management system in the untrusted cloud by leveraging the hardware-assisted TEE and software attestation; (2) Supporting Java-written workflow tasks to overcome the limitation of SGX’s lack of support for Java programs; and (3) Reducing the adverse impact of SGX enclave memory paging overhead through a “Hybrid” workflow task scheduling system that selectively deploys sensitive tasks to a mix of SGX and SEV worker nodes. Our experimental results show that SecDATAVIEW imposes moderate overhead on the workflow execution time.

Big data workflow management systems (BDWFMSs) have recently emerged as popular platforms to perform large-scale data analytics in the cloud. However, the protection of data confidentiality and secure execution of workflow applications remains an important and challenging problem. Although a few data analytics systems were developed to address this problem, they are limited to specific structures such as Map-Reduce-style workflows and SQL queries. This paper proposes SecDATAVIEW, a BDWFMS that leverages Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) to develop a heterogeneous trusted execution environment for workflows. SecDATAVIEW aims to (1) provide the confidentiality and integrity of code and data for workflows running on public untrusted clouds, (2) minimize the TCB size for a BDWFMS, (3) enable the trade-off between security and performance for workflows, and (4) support the execution of Java-based workflow tasks in SGX. Our experimental results show that SecDATAVIEW imposes 1.69x to 2.62x overhead on workflow execution time on SGX worker nodes, 1.04x to 1.29x overhead on SEV worker nodes, and 1.20x to 1.43x overhead on a heterogeneous setting in which both SGX and SEV worker nodes are used.