HPISecure: Towards Data Confidentiality in Cloud Applications

Cloud computing has emerged over the last years as a new model of delivering computation to consumers. Due to the nature of the cloud, where the data and the computation are beyond the control of the user, data privacy and security becomes a vital factor in this new paradigm. Several research studies reported that security and privacy is cited as the biggest concern in adopting cloud computing. In this paper, we present HPISecure, a software prototype designed to facilitate the process of securing data stored on the cloud. HPISecure allows the user to store an encrypted version of his data on the cloud without breaking the functionality of the application. HPISecure intercepts the HTTP request/response objects, encrypt data before transmitting to the cloud, and decrypt data received back from the server. We have successfully tested HPISecure with Google Docs and Google Calender. Future work includes extending HPISecure to work with enterprise applications.