Mimesis Aegis: A Mimicry Privacy Shield A System’s Approach to Data Privacy on Public Cloud Billy Lau, Simon Chung, Chengyu Song, Yeongjin Jang, Wenke Lee, and Alexandra Boldyreva College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 fbilly, pchung, csong84, yeongjin.jang, wenke,
[email protected] Abstract on Android: imperceptible encryption/decryption la- Users are increasingly storing, accessing, and ex- tency and a low and adjustable false positive rate when changing data through public cloud services such as searching over encrypted data. those provided by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Mi- crosoft. Although users may want to have faith in cloud 1 Introduction providers to provide good security protection, the confi- dentiality of any data in public clouds can be violated, A continuously increasing number of users now utilize and consequently, while providers may not be “doing mobile devices [2] to interact with public cloud services evil,” we can not and should not trust them with data con- (PCS) (e.g. Gmail, Outlook, and WhatsApp) as an es- fidentiality. sential part of their daily lives. While the user’s con- To better protect the privacy of user data stored in the nectivity to the Internet is improved with mobile plat- cloud, in this paper we propose a privacy-preserving sys- forms, the problem of preserving data privacy while in- tem called Mimesis Aegis (M-Aegis) that is suitable for teracting with PCS remains unsolved. In fact, news about mobile platforms. M-Aegis is a new approach to user the US government’s alleged surveillance programs re- data privacy that not only provides isolation but also pre- minds everybody about a very unsatisfactory status quo: serves the user experience through the creation of a con- while PCS are essentially part of everyday life, the de- ceptual layer called Layer 7.5 (L-7.5), which is inter- fault method of utilizing them exposes users to privacy posed between the application (OSI Layer 7) and the user breaches, because it implicitly requires the users to trust (Layer 8).