The Cloud we Share: Access Control on Symmetrically Encrypted Data in Untrusted Clouds

Along with the rapid growth of cloud environments, rises the problem of secure data storage. – a problem that both businesses and end-users take into consideration before moving their data online. Recently, a lot of solutions have been proposed based either on Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE) or Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE). SSE is an encryption technique that offers security against both internal and external attacks. However, since in an SSE scheme, a single key is used to encrypt everything, revoking a user would imply downloading the entire encrypted database and re-encrypt it with a fresh key. On the other hand, in an ABE scheme, the problem of revocation can be addressed. Unfortunately, though, the proposed solutions are based on the properties of the underlying ABE scheme and hence, the revocation costs grow along with the complexity of the policies. To this end, we use these two cryptographic techniques that squarely fit cloud-based environments to design a hybrid encryption scheme based on ABE and SSE in such a way that we utilize the best out of both of them. Moreover, we exploit the functionalities offered by Intel’s SGX to design a revocation mechanism and an access control one, that are agnostic to the cryptographic primitives used in our construction

MooseGuard: secure file sharing at scale in untrusted environments

Shared storage systems provide cheap, scalable, and reliable storage, but secure sharing in these systems requires users to encrypt their data and limit efficient sharing or trust a service provider to faithfully keep their data private. Current research has explored the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs) to operate on sensitive data and sharing policies in isolated execution. That work enables the utilization of untrusted shared resources to store and share sensitive data while maintaining stronger security guarantees. However, current research has limitations in scaling these solutions, as it bottlenecks both metadata and data operations within the same physical TEE, whereas a scaled file system distributes metadata and data operations to separate devices. This paper explores the use of two TEEs specialized for metadata and data operations to provide file sharing at scale with less overhead in addition to strong security guarantees. This approach achieves scaled metadata and concurrent use by utilizing a server-side TEE for isolated execution on a master server and provides data privacy and efficient access revocation through a client-side TEE. MooseGuard is the prototype implementation of this design, utilizing Intel SGX as a TEE and extending the MooseFS distributed file system. MooseGuard's implementation details the modifications needed to provide security and shows how this approach can be applied to a typical distributed file system. An evaluation of MooseGuard demonstrates that TEEs specialized for metadata and data operations allow a secured distributed file system to maintain its scale with only constant overheads. As TEEs and secure hardware become more widely available in public clouds, enterprise, and personal devices, MooseGuard presents a way for users to get the best of both worlds in data privacy and efficient sharing when using scaled, shared storage systems

iPrivacy: a Distributed Approach to Privacy on the Cloud

The increasing adoption of Cloud storage poses a number of privacy issues. Users wish to preserve full control over their sensitive data and cannot accept that it to be accessible by the remote storage provider. Previous research was made on techniques to protect data stored on untrusted servers; however we argue that the cloud architecture presents a number of open issues. To handle them, we present an approach where confidential data is stored in a highly distributed database, partly located on the cloud and partly on the clients. Data is shared in a secure manner using a simple grant-and-revoke permission of shared data and we have developed a system test implementation, using an in-memory RDBMS with row-level data encryption for fine-grained data access controlComment: 13 pages, International Journal on Advances in Security 2011 vol.4 no 3 & 4. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1012.0759, arXiv:1109.355

Secure data sharing in cloud and IoT by leveraging attribute-based encryption and blockchain

“Data sharing is very important to enable different types of cloud and IoT-based services. For example, organizations migrate their data to the cloud and share it with employees and customers in order to enjoy better fault-tolerance, high-availability, and scalability offered by the cloud. Wearable devices such as smart watch share user’s activity, location, and health data (e.g., heart rate, ECG) with the service provider for smart analytic. However, data can be sensitive, and the cloud and IoT service providers cannot be fully trusted with maintaining the security, privacy, and confidentiality of the data. Hence, new schemes and protocols are required to enable secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. This work outlines our research contribution towards secure data sharing in the cloud and IoT. For secure data sharing in the cloud, this work proposes several novel attribute-based encryption schemes. The core contributions to this end are efficient revocation, prevention of collusion attacks, and multi-group support. On the other hand, for secure data sharing in IoT, a permissioned blockchain-based access control system has been proposed. The system can be used to enforce fine-grained access control on IoT data where the access control decision is made by the blockchain-based on the consensus of the participating nodes”--Abstract, page iv

Towards Practical Access Control and Usage Control on the Cloud using Trusted Hardware

Cloud-based platforms have become the principle way to store, share, and synchronize files online. For individuals and organizations alike, cloud storage not only provides resource scalability and on-demand access at a low cost, but also eliminates the necessity of provisioning and maintaining complex hardware installations. Unfortunately, because cloud-based platforms are frequent victims of data breaches and unauthorized disclosures, data protection obliges both access control and usage control to manage user authorization and regulate future data use. Encryption can ensure data security against unauthorized parties, but complicates file sharing which now requires distributing keys to authorized users, and a mechanism that prevents revoked users from accessing or modifying sensitive content. Further, as user data is stored and processed on remote ma- chines, usage control in a distributed setting requires incorporating the local environmental context at policy evaluation, as well as tamper-proof and non-bypassable enforcement. Existing cryptographic solutions either require server-side coordination, offer limited flexibility in data sharing, or incur significant re-encryption overheads on user revocation. This combination of issues are ill-suited within large-scale distributed environments where there are a large number of users, dynamic changes in user membership and access privileges, and resources are shared across organizational domains. Thus, developing a robust security and privacy solution for the cloud requires: fine-grained access control to associate the largest set of users and resources with variable granularity, scalable administration costs when managing policies and access rights, and cross-domain policy enforcement. To address the above challenges, this dissertation proposes a practical security solution that relies solely on commodity trusted hardware to ensure confidentiality and integrity throughout the data lifecycle. The aim is to maintain complete user ownership against external hackers and malicious service providers, without losing the scalability or availability benefits of cloud storage. Furthermore, we develop a principled approach that is: (i) portable across storage platforms without requiring any server-side support or modifications, (ii) flexible in allowing users to selectively share their data using fine-grained access control, and (iii) performant by imposing modest overheads on standard user workloads. Essentially, our system must be client-side, provide end-to-end data protection and secure sharing, without significant degradation in performance or user experience. We introduce NeXUS, a privacy-preserving filesystem that enables cryptographic protection and secure file sharing on existing network-based storage services. NeXUS protects the confidentiality and integrity of file content, as well as file and directory names, while mitigating against rollback attacks of the filesystem hierarchy. We also introduce Joplin, a secure access control and usage control system that provides practical attribute-based sharing with decentralized policy administration, including efficient revocation, multi-domain policies, secure user delegation, and mandatory audit logging. Both systems leverage trusted hardware to prevent the leakage of sensitive material such as encryption keys and access control policies; they are completely client-side, easy to install and use, and can be readily deployed across remote storage platforms without requiring any server-side changes or trusted intermediary. We developed prototypes for NeXUS and Joplin, and evaluated their respective overheads in isolation and within a real-world environment. Results show that both prototypes introduce modest overheads on interactive workloads, and achieve portability across storage platforms, including Dropbox and AFS. Together, NeXUS and Joplin demonstrate that a client-side solution employing trusted hardware such as Intel SGX can effectively protect remotely stored data on existing file sharing services