Information Privacy Protection in the Cloud

Cloud computing services enable their clients to access computing resources through Internet and increase and decrease capacity according to their demand. In this type of computing environment, client’s data such as personal health and financial data or logged records on using services are stored in the cloud; therefore, protection on information privacy is essential to gain the trust of the public. This proposed research will focus on technical solutions, primarily on two approaches: (1) hiding identification information, i.e. separating identification data from data on other attributes, and (2) controlling the encryption of data and decryption of encrypted data. The research period is three years. In the first year, we will focus on the approach based on identification hiding; as an exemplary application, we will design a method for information privacy protection in context-awareness mobile applications. In the second year, we will research on another new method, which we name discretionary encryption and decryption control. In the third year, we will study the integration of the two aforementioned methods to find out applicable circumstances for each and circumstances that demand integration of the two. The core idea of this research is to enable the client to control his information privacy at his own discretion. In the past two years, the principal investigator and his students have obtained some results on this direction as described in the literature survey section of this proposal. We will extend the obtained results to a more solid, generally applicable and comprehensive class of methods for privacy protection in the cloud. We expect to produce new inventions, and file patent applications based on our inventions. We also expect to publish papers in academic journals and design and develop practical systems for the emerging industry of cloud computing service.

Project ID:PB10106-0245
External Project ID:NSC101-2410-H182-001-MY2