Section: New Results

Personal Cloud Architecture Based on Trusted Execution Environments (Axis 1)

Participants : Nicolas Anciaux [correspondent] , Luc Bouganim, Riad Ladjel, Julien Loudet, Benjamin Nguyen, Philippe Pucheral, Iulian Sandu Popa, Guillaume Scerri, Paul Tran Van.

The Personal Cloud paradigm and its challenges: The time of individualized management and control over one’s personal data is upon us. Thanks to smart disclosure initiatives, we can access our personal data from the companies or government agencies that collected them. Concurrently, Personal Cloud solutions are flourishing. Their goal is to empower us to leverage our personal data for our own good. However, managing our own personal data constitutes a considerable burden. We must now: (1) ensure the security of the data we gather; and (2) manage the disclosed data and control its usage. We inherit the combined responsibility of an information security expert and a database administrator. Since very few users are actually IT experts, personal cloud providers propose solutions to manage personal data on behalf of their customers. Thus, paradoxically, instead of empowering users, smart disclosure and personal clouds create new privacy risks. In this work, we formulate this paradox and the problems it creates. Our central contribution is a reference architecture for the Personal Cloud, instantiated on several hardware configuration using trusted execution environments (paper in preparation).