NSA's Accumulo NoSQL Store Offers Role-Based Data Access

Unlike other NoSQL data stores, Accumulo provides role-based access to data

With its much-discussed enthusiasm for collecting large amounts of data, the NSA naturally found much interest in the idea of highly scalable NoSQL databases.

But the U.S. intelligence agency needed some security of its own, so it developed a NoSQL data store called Accumulo with built-in policy enforcement mechanisms that strictly limit who can see its data.

At the O'Reilly Strata-Hadoop World conference this week in New York, one of the former National Security Agency developers behind the software, Adam Fuchs, explained how Accumulo works and how it could be used in fields other than intelligence gathering. The agency contributed the software's source code to the Apache Software Foundation in 2011.