Data Storage on the Cloud under User Control

Cloud services provide advantages in terms of service scalability and availability of users´ data, but increase concerns about the control that a user has over her own data. These concerns include not just issues related to access to the information itself, but issues about the effective deletion of the information by the cloud in compliance with the user´s right to deletion. In this on-going work, we present a mechanism that allows users to control access to and deletion of their information stored on the cloud. Our construction separates the user´s content into several encoded pieces most of which are stored by a cloud provider. The remaining encoded pieces are stored by the user and are served directly from the user´s infrastructure to the persons interested in viewing the content. The encoding must satisfy the property that without the pieces stored in the user´s infrastructure none of the data is revealed. This property is found in several constructions related to secret sharing. We evaluate the practical feasibility of our proposal by developing an image sharing mechanism and simulating the user infrastructure using a single-board computer connected to the home Internet connection of one of the authors.