NSA Submits Open Source, Secure Database To Apache
The National Security Agency is moving to open source a secure database technology, Accumulo, that it has been developing internally since 2008.
The spy agency over the weekend submitted the project, constructed of about 200,000 lines of mostly Java code, to the Apache Foundation for incubation.
Fine-grained access control is the primary feature of Accumulo that differs from other similar databases. Accumulo includes cell-level security, which would allow organizations making use of it to let users access only particular fields of the database. In its submission to the Apache Foundation, the NSA said that it expects that verticals that have a keen interest in privacy, such as the government and healthcare providers, may find the most use for Accumulo. Other features include a storage format that improves compression.
