With the advent of cloud technologies, there is a growing number of easy-to-use services to store files and share them with other cloud users. By providing security features, cloud service providers try to encourage users to store personal files or corporate documents on their servers. However, their server-side encryption solutions are not satisfactory when the server itself is not trusted. Although, there are several client-side solutions to provide security for cloud sharing, they are not used extensively because of usability issues in key management. In this paper, we propose TwinCloud which is an innovative solution with the goal of providing a secure system to users without compromising the usability of cloud sharing. TwinCloud achieves this by bringing a novel solution to the complex key exchange problem and by providing a simple and practical approach to store and share files by hiding all the cryptographic and key-distribution operations from users. Serving as a gateway, TwinCloud uses two or more cloud providers to store the encryption keys and encrypted files in separate clouds which ease the secure sharing without a need for trust to either of the cloud service providers with the assumption that they do not collude with each other. We implemented TwinCloud as a lightweight application and make it available as open-source. The results of our usability study show the prospect of the secure sharing solution of TwinCloud.
Yin et.al @cite_15 proposed another efficient secure data storage scheme using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) based PKI. Before using this solution, users need to authenticate to a Certificate Authority (CA) and register for a certificate. When users want to share a file with other authenticated users, the user first encrypts the data with his symmetric key and encrypts the symmetric key with the private key of his her registered certificate. After the encryption process, authenticated users can obtain the public key and decrypt the encrypted key to get the symmetric key. The symmetric key, then, will be used to decrypt the file. The main advantage of this solution is the efficiency of preferring ECC over other algorithms like RSA. Because of the small key length, this solution requires less computation and communication cost.
@cite_15
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We propose a multi-user Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE) scheme based on the single-user Oblivious Cross Tags (OXT) protocol (, CRYPTO 2013). The scheme allows any user to perform a search query by interacting with the server and any ( -1 ) ‘helping’ users, and preserves the privacy of database content against the server even assuming leakage of up to ( -1 ) users’ keys to the server (for a threshold parameter ( )), while hiding the query from the ( -1 ) ‘helping users’. To achieve the latter query privacy property, we design a new distributed key-homomorphic pseudorandom function (PRF) that hides the PRF input (search keyword) from the ‘helping’ key share holders. By distributing the utilized keys among the users, the need of constant online presence of the data owner to provide services to the users is eliminated, while providing resilience against user key exposure.