YI Cloud: Improving user privacy with secret key recovery in cloud storage

Abstract

Cloud Storage systems provide user a safe and consistent place to save user's valuable data and documents. However, user's files are not encrypted on some open source cloud storage systems, such as Hadoop and Sector. The storage service provider can easily access the user's files. This brings a big concern about user's privacy. This paper describes a cloud storage system named YI Cloud. This system allows the users to encrypt their files in the cloud storage. User's primary encryption key is shared between trusted entities using secret sharing algorithm. The primary key can be recovered when the user loses it. User's privacy is protected because user's files are encrypted in cloud storage. Using secret sharing algorithm, the YI Cloud also decreases the risk that user may lose all his/her encrypted files if he/she loses the encryption key.