(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014-07)
Lau, Billy; Chung, Simon; Song, Chengyu; Jang, Yeongjin; Lee, Wenke; Boldyreva, Alexandra
Users are increasingly storing, accessing, and exchanging
data through public cloud services such as
those provided by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft.
Although users may want to have faith in cloud
providers to provide good security protection, the Snowden
expos´e is the latest reminder of the reality we live in:
the confidentiality of any data in public clouds can be violated,
and consequently, while the providers may not be
“doing evil”, we can not and should not trust them with
data confidentiality.
To better protect the privacy of user data stored on the
cloud, in this paper we propose a privacy-preserving system
called Mimesis Aegis (M-Aegis) that is suitable for
mobile platforms. M-Aegis is a new approach to user
data privacy that not only provides isolation but also preserves
user experience, through the creation of a conceptual
layer called Layer 7.5 (L-7.5), which is interposed
between the application (Layer 7) and the user (Layer 8).
This approach allows M-Aegis to implement a true endto-
end encryption of user data with three goals in mind:
1) complete data and logic isolation from untrusted entities;
2) the preservation of original user experience with
target apps; and 3) applicable to a large number of apps
and resilient to updates.