XSX: Lightweight Encryption for Data Warehousing Environments

The use of data security solutions like encryption significantly reduces database performance in data-intensive processing environments such as Data Warehouses. To overcome this issue this paper proposes a transparent lightweight encryption technique based on alternating sequences of eXclusive Or (XOR) and bit switching operations. The technique aims to achieve high performance while providing significant levels of security strength, attaining better security-performance tradeoffs than most commercial encryption solutions and those proposed by the research community. The experimental evaluation conducted using the TPC-DS benchmark shows that the proposed technique adds lower database performance overhead when comparing with the AES standard encryption algorithm and with other encryption solutions such as OPES, Salsa20, TEA and SES-DW.