Sedas: A Self Destructive Active Storage Framework for Data Privacy

R. C. Dharmik; Hemlata Dakhore; Vaishali Jadhao

Abstract: Personal data that we store in the Cloud may contain account numbers, passwords, notes, and other important information that could be used and misused by a miscreant, a competitor, or a court of law. These data are cached and copied by Cloud Service Providers, often without users? authorization and control. Self-destructing data mainly aims at protecting the user data?s privacy. All the data and their copies become destructed or unreadable after a user-specified time, without any information to user. In addition, the decryption key is destructed after the user-specified time. In this paper, we present a system that meets this challenge through a novel integration of cryptographic techniques with active storage techniques. We implemented a proof-of-concept self destructive prototype. Through functionality and security properties evaluations of this prototype, the results demonstrate that the system is practical to use and meets all the privacy-preserving goals described. Compared to the system without self-destructing data mechanism, throughput for uploading and downloading with the proposed system acceptably decreases, while latency for upload/download operations with self-destructing data mechanism increases.

Keywords: Active storage, Cloud computing, data privacy, self-destructing data