| Cloud computing applications have increased significantly in recent years due to improved accessibility, availability and services at reduced costs. Examples of such services include Google Calendar, Microsoft HealthVault, and Yahoo Briefcase. In such services, the service provider provides the storage as well as the cloud application that utilizes the storage. Despite their benefits however, these services present significant security and privacy risks to their users. Users data is exposed to both outsider and insider attacks, and users don't have any control over the security and privacy management of the data. We propose CloudProtect, a middleware that sits between the client and service provider applications empowering users with the ability to manage their security and privacy needs for these cloud applications. The middleware enables the tradeoff analysis between data privacy, usability, and efficiency. We implemented CloudProtect and adapted it to work with Google Calendar, Google Docs, and Gmail. Our experimental results highlight the feasibility of the approach. |
