Privacy in the Cloud: Client-Side Encryption and Online Key Management for Cloud-Based Collaboration.

Session Date and Time: Day 2, March 24, 13:00pm EST (10:00am West Coast) (30min)
Keywords: collaboration, Encryption, Key Management, Privacy, security.
Authors: David Sussman and Charles Chung and Qiang Lin, PhD, Bits Republic Technologies (Canada).
Abstract: Enterprises of all sizes share, and collaborate on, digital information: both within their organizations, as well as with clients and strategic partners. A variety of technologies exist to meet this need, notably local and Internet-based email servers, FTP servers, third party hosted application services, data storage systems, and peered data networks. Most organizations use a combination of these technologies, but each has limitations. Businesses inevitably find that they face compromises among flexibility, portability, functionality, affordability, and (perhaps most importantly) security.

Moving collaboration into the cloud by pairing client-side encryption with secondary online key management provides an interesting resolution to the conundrum of how to achieve flexible, portable, and economical sharing and collaboration without sacrificing privacy and security. Such an approach enables sharing and collaboration of files between multiple parties, while effectively preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data, even by service providers themselves.

As with any technology, there are tradeoffs. When the host applications are blind to their clients’ data, remote search capability and advanced server-side analytics are limited. In many cases, a hybrid system is in order, where non-critical data is processed at the server, and client-side encryption is paired with secondary online key management to create an unprecedented level of privacy, security, and functionality where it is most needed.