Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The proposed research addresses the security and privacy of user-generated private data content in the context of personalized cloud computing services. As a global trend as well as a strategic move for Canada's IT infrastructure, the new paradigm of cloud computing has matured from a buzzword to a concrete concept adopted by many leading providers such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud/Simple Storage Service (EC2/S3), Google AppEngine, and Microsoft Mesh. By moving both data and computing away from personal computers into large data centers, cloud computing will eventually allow computation to be provided as a public utility, similar to water or electricity. Cloud-based services will provide personal users with advantages such as on-demand capacity, reduced maintenance cost, increased reliability, scalability, and accessibility. Additional advantages for organizations include the capability for dynamically updating infrastructure elements, mitigating the cost of data centers, and avoiding the need for creating new platforms for each new application. However, the lack of security guarantee and resultant trust and privacy issues are among the topmost barriers to a wider adoption of virtually hosted hardware and software provided by cloud computing. One of the most intriguing security issues facing cloud computing lies in the fact that users usually have little control over their own data content. Actually, users are most concerned about their privacy in managing content, such as blogs, social profiles, photos, video clips, etc., that may contain sensitive personal information. Users must heavily rely on cloud providers for security and privacy protection. The proposed project aims at removing the aforementioned obstacles through a personalized cloud computing approach to protecting user-generated content. Specifically, the objective encompasses two complementary aspects. First, we aim at allowing users to regain control over their own contents. This will bring back the missing security and privacy guarantee since users no longer need to solely rely on providers for protection. Second, we aim at freeing providers from the intimidating obligations of security protection and make them happy adopters of this new paradigm.