MimoSecco: A Middleware for Secure Cloud Storage

Abstract

The biggest impediment for the adoption of cloud computing practices is the lack of trust in the confidentiality of one’s data in the cloud. The prevalent threat in the cloud computing model are so-called insider attacks. Full data encryption can only solve the problem in the trivial case of backups. Any sophisticated service provided on data requires insight into the structure of that data. One purpose of encryption is to prevent such insights. We introduce the MimoSecco project. In MimoSecco, we are investigating reasonable compromises. We employ two techniques, separation of duties and secure hardware. With separation of duties, we fragment a database and separate the fragments geographically. The goal is to make it infeasible to reconstruct the database from one fragment alone. The secure hardware tokens we employ are hard-to-copy devices which offer encryption, decryption and cryptographically signing of data. The keys used are stored in the tamper-proof hardware device and never leave it. We are in the process of developing a prototypical database adapter that behaves like a SQL database, but stores data securely.

This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, Germany (BMWi, Contract No. 01MS10002). The responsibility for the content of this article lies solely with the authors.