SecCollab - Improving Confidentiality for Existing Cloud-Based Collaborative Editors

• Published in: 2017 21st International Conference on Control Systems and Computer Science (CSCS) pp. 324 - 331
• Main Authors: Stancu, Florin-Alexandru, Chiroiu, Mihai, Rughinis, Razvan
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-05-2017
• Subjects: Collaboration; Cryptography; documents; Google; privacy; Protocols; Real-time systems; Servers; Synchronization
• DOI: 10.1109/CSCS.2017.51
• EISSN: 2379-0482

Collaborative technologies have gained popularity due to the widespread adoption of cloud computing and web applications. Services like Google Docs, Office 365 can make one's documents accessible from everywhere, allowing real-time cooperative editing by multiple authors. From a security standpoint, they may offer transport protection by means of TLS, but the users's confidential data can still be read by the cloud service provider. In this paper, we present a system, called SecCollab, that protects users' privacy while using collaborative editors. Our solution does not require any changes to the existing applications and all collaborative editing features are preserved. We evaluate and show a moderate storage overhead (a linear 250%) and negligible encryption time.