Steganography and Cryptography for User Data in Calendars

Abstract

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves, or their private information, and thereby express themselves selectively. Nowadays the increasing usage and popularity of web services indicate the likelihood of privacy disclosures. Data breaches are the number one privacy threat when using cloud services. To avoid the possibility for data theft users should not trust anyone including the service providers. If they do not rely on the providers’ defense methods, they have to make sure that outgoing traffic remains a secret for everyone. In this paper, we propose our model and our prototype implementation for a client-side data encoder, that aims to solve the privacy disclosure problems. We show different binarization (character string to binary string) and encoding methods (binary string to character string), which with, we can provide secure and hidden data encoding by translating the user data into different sentences that can be considered as valid data. We make sure that only encoded data can be stored in the providers’ storage, therefore we not just ensure that no one has direct access to unencoded data, but we are able to conceal the very existence of the encoding at all.