Elastic and Secure Energy Forecasting in Cloud Environments

Although cloud computing offers many advantages with regards to adaption of resources, we witness either a strong resistance or a very slow adoption to those new offerings. One reason for the resistance is that (i) many technologies such as stream processing systems still lack of appropriate mechanisms for elasticity in order to fully harness the power of the cloud, and (ii) do not provide mechanisms for secure processing of privacy sensitive data such as when analyzing energy consumption data provided through smart plugs in the context of smart grids. In this white paper, we present our vision and approach for elastic and secure processing of streaming data. Our approach is based on STREAMMINE3G, an elastic event stream processing system and Intel’s SGX technology that provides secure processing using enclaves. We highlight the key aspects of our approach and research challenges when using Intel’s SGX technology. Keywords—data streaming, ESP, event stream processing, programming model, stateful event processing, fault tolerance, elasticity, privacy, confidentiality