NSA Accumulo Software: Advanced Label-Based Security for Data Storage

The National Security Agency has submitted its new, label-based data store software to the Apache Software Foundation, in hopes that others will further develop it for use in secure systems. Called Accumulo, the software uses "expressive, fine-grained" labels that can tag each cell in a data store. Security policies can then be applied to the individual labels to, for example, allow an external server to access some cells but not others.

Based on Google's Big Table design, Accumulo is a simple key/value data store, where providing the system with the key will return any data associated with that key. Featuring a distributed design, Accumulo can be run across multiple servers, making it a good candidate for managing big data systems, the NSA said.

The link for this article located at Network World is no longer available.