I-Corps: Secure Document Management in the Cloud

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Researchers propose to build a tool that could be used on top of existing cloud storage services to enable secure document management in the cloud. In essence, using our client side apps developed for different platforms, all the documents will be automatically encrypted before they are sent to the cloud and stored in the cloud in an encrypted format. Therefore, the cloud service provider will not have any access to stored documents. In addition, encryption keys will be automatically managed by our server side solution. Using techniques developed as a part of prior research, the tool's server side implementation will provide efficient search over encrypted data, role-based access control, secure document sharing, and audit log generation. Furthermore, due to the proposed design that separates encryption keys into multiple pieces, any potential hacking into our server cannot be used to recover any document stored in the cloud. In addition, our server will never store any information related to documents in plaintext form. This project will allow researchers to understand best practices in managing encrypted data in the context of cloud and mobile services. In addition, it will allow them to see the performance and limitations of current encrypted data management solutions (including ours) in real operating environments. Longer-term, if this project is successful, it could substantially decrease the privacy and economic risks of information disclosure due to usage of cloud and mobile services. This could have a direct economic impact, as well as increasing trust in using cloud based document management services, opening the way for new applications that would today be considered infeasible due to lack of necessary security and compliance mechanisms.