StealthyCRM, a secure Cloud CRM system application that supports fully homomorphic database encryption

Abstract

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system improves companies’ profitability by helping companies focus on the relationships with customers, colleagues or suppliers. Though having strong initiative to move applications to cloud, enterprises are hindered by cloud security and reliability issue [1], especially when it comes to financial industries. To provide a practical and secure solution to these enterprises, this project aims to build a cloud CRM system that enables fully homomorphic encryption. In order to explore the potential of this, the project integrats three key components: Open source CRM system SugarCRM, partial homomorphic database system CryptDB and fully homomorphic encryption library HElib. By leveraging the structure proposed by Silivanxay [2], StealthyCRM successfully integrates fully homomorphic encryption support on top of CryptDB database encryption environment. Besides that, StealthyCRM enables a transparent and seamless integration to any CRM system by using a modified MySQL proxy to listen to, encrypt the queries and interact with CryptDB and HElib subsystems. An evaluation of TPC-C and TPC-H queries is conducted on StealthyCRM system. The result shows StealthyCRM has 14%-28% throughput overhead (request per second) for most of the CRM queries, compared with unmodified MySQL server. For complex TPC-H queries involving multiplication and composition of computation, StealthyCRM is able to execute the query between 1.75 min to 11.7 min. Although the time takes to complete a fully homomorphic query in CRM system is still long, StealthyCRM provided a prototype for researchers and other business application developers to explore the potential.