Roberto Tamassia, Brown University - January 2012

The proposal plans to research security issues in access to cloud storage data from enterprises. Specifically, they would like to address cases where vital information can leak even in the presence of encrypted data transfers to/from the cloud. For example, an intruder can monitor encrypted traffic to a cloud storage service provider and can glean important information just by observing the data access patterns. To address this issue, they propose the idea of “obfuscating” data accesses by the right amount to prevent detection using techniques with strict theoretical bounds. The proposed techniques may lead to an increase in data transfers to the cloud – both in the number of bytes as well as requests. So, the challenge in their proposal is to explore the different tradeoffs that arise and evaluate them.