Computing Reviews
Today's Issue Hot Topics Search Browse Recommended My Account Log In
Review Help
Search
Cloudsweeper and data-centric security
Snyder P., Kanich C. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society44 (2):8-10,2014.Type:Article
Date Reviewed: Nov 20 2014

Internet users want their data on the Internet--for example, emails and Facebook data--to be well protected against malicious attacks. Current technologies either use end-to-end encryption for all data in the user’s Internet account, or use more advanced authentication techniques to protect access to the user account. These technologies are of great inconvenience to users. For example, each email should be decrypted before it is read or it is more difficult for valid users to access their accounts.

This paper presents a selective encryption technique that provides security to Internet users with acceptable convenience. The Cloudsweeper technique uses string searching or machine learning technology to automatically identify the security sensitive data in a user account, and then applies encryption to the identified security sensitive data only. The authors have developed a tool that can be publicly downloaded.

Cloudsweeper first searches through messages in a user’s email account for pieces of text that may be passwords, and then gives the account holder the option to encrypt each password while leaving the rest of the messages unchanged. Encrypted passwords are later decrypted when the emails are read. For identifying sensitive pieces of text, Cloudsweeper uses either handwritten regular expressions or technologies like Judo [1] to do more comprehensive term extraction.

If you are interested in Internet security, this paper is a good read, as you will get a clear understanding of how user account data is typically protected. It is also a good source for Internet security experts since it presents a novel perspective that helps broaden the horizon on providing security to Internet data. Service providers looking for a practical solution to guard customer data against malicious attacks should read the details on how to identify sensitive data and an evaluation of the Cloudsweeper technique [2]. According to the reference [2], Cloudsweeper identifies 96 percent of sensitive data.

Reviewer:  Long Wang Review #: CR142960 (1502-0170)
1) Pitsillidis, A.; Levchenko, K.; Kreibich, C.; Kanich, C.; Voelker, G. M.; Paxson, V.; Weaver, N.; Savage, S. Botnet Judo: fighting spam with itself. In Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. The Internet Society, 2010, 1–19.
2) Snyder, P.; Kanich, C. Cloudsweeper: enabling data-centric document management for secure cloud archives. In Proceedings of the Cloud Computing Security Workshop. ACM, 2013, 47–54.
Bookmark and Share
  Reviewer Selected
 
 
Information Storage (H.3.2 )
 
 
General (C.2.0 )
 
 
Security and Protection (D.4.6 )
 
Would you recommend this review?
yes
no
Other reviews under "Information Storage": Date
Principles of delay-sensitive multimedia data storage retrieval
Gemmell J., Christodoulakis S. (ed) ACM Transactions on Information Systems 10(1): 51-90, 1992. Type: Article
May 1 1993
Partial match retrieval in implicit data structures
Alt H., Mehlhorn K., Munro J. Information Processing Letters 19(2): 61-65, 1984. Type: Article
May 1 1985
Performance of two-disk partition data allocations
Chang C., Chen C. BIT 27(3): 306-314, 1987. Type: Article
Mar 1 1988
more...

E-Mail This Printer-Friendly
Send Your Comments
Contact Us
Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.   Copyright 1999-2024 ThinkLoud®
Terms of Use
| Privacy Policy