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Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

5-2020

Culminating Project Type

Starred Paper

Degree Name

Information Assurance: M.S.

Department

Information Assurance and Information Systems

College

Herberger School of Business

First Advisor

Dr. Abdullah Abu Hussein

Second Advisor

Dr. Mark B. Schmidt

Third Advisor

Dr. Balasubramanian Kasi

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Abstract

Due to the increasing amounts and the different kinds of data that need to be stored in the databases, companies, and organizations are rapidly adopting NoSQL databases to compete. These databases were not designed with security as a priority. NoSQL open-source software was primarily developed to handle unstructured data for the purpose of business intelligence and decision support. Over the years, security features have been added to these databases but they are not as robust as they should be, and there is a scope for improvement as the sophistication of the hackers has been increasing. Moreover, the schema-less design of these databases makes it more difficult to implement traditional RDBMS like security features in these databases. Two popular NoSQL databases are MongoDB and Apache Cassandra. Although there is a lot of research related to security vulnerabilities and suggestions to improve the security of NoSQL databases, this research focusses specifically on MongoDB and Cassandra databases. This study aims to identify and analyze all the security vulnerabilities that MongoDB and Cassandra databases have that are specific to them and come up with a step-by-step guide that can help organizations to secure their data stored in these databases. This is very important because the design and vulnerabilities of each NoSQL database are different from one another and hence require security recommendations that are specific to them.

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