Trust Level Based Data Storage and Data Access Control in a Distributed Storage Environment

In the face of enormously increasing amount of personal digital data distributed over various devices, end users are challenged to efficiently store and administrate them. Mostly, users are making use of public storage services in the cloud and local storage devices. Whereas, people with IT expertise make use of sophisticated and expensive network attached storage solutions or self-managed server solutions. Moreover, besides the pure data storage process itself, privacy aware data handling will become important in the future which enables access control to the data in order to avoid malicious access from other users, applications and / or services. For taking advantages from the benefits of the aforementioned different approaches, we advocate an integrated solution. Due to privacy concerns, the most important aspect to take into consideration in such a combined solution is trustworthiness. This paper introduces a trust level based data storage and trust level based data access control solution which changes the control process of data storage and data access. The introduced solution enables user-friendly data handling based on assigned trust levels to storage solutions in a distributed data storage environment and the classified sensitivity level of the data to be stored.