With the increased use of Internet, governments and large companies store and share massive amounts of personal data in such a way that leaves no space for transparency. When a user needs to achieve a simple task like applying for college or a driving license, he needs to visit a lot of institutions and organizations, thus leaving a lot of private data in many places. The same happens when using the Internet. These privacy issues raised by the centralized architectures along with the recent developments in the area of serverless applications demand a decentralized private data layer under user control.
Sovereign information sharing allows autonomous entities to compute queries across their databases in such a way that nothing apart from the result is revealed. We describe an implementation of this model using web services infrastructure. Each site participating in sovereign sharing offers a data service that allows database operations to be applied on the tables they own. Of particular interest is the provision for binary operations such as relational joins. Applications are developed by combining these data services. We present performance measurements that show the promise of a new breed of practical applications based on the paradigm of sovereign information integration. The rapidly growing demand for cloud services in the current business practice has favored the success of the hybrid clouds and the advent of cloud federation. The available literature of this topic has focused on middleware abstraction to interoperate heterogeneous cloud platforms and orchestrate different management and business models. However, cloud federation implies serious security and privacy issues with respect to data sovereignty when data is outsourced across different judicial and legal systems. This column describes a solution that applies encryption to protect data sovereignty in federated clouds rather than restricting the elasticity and migration of data across federated clouds. Literature on information integration across databases tacitly assumes that the data in each database can be revealed to the other databases. However, there is an increasing need for sharing information across autonomous entities in such a way that no information apart from the answer to the query is revealed. We formalize the notion of minimal information sharing across private databases, and develop protocols for intersection, equijoin, intersection size, and equijoin size. We also show how new applications can be built using the proposed protocols.