SafeSky: A Secure Cloud Storage Middleware for End-User Applications

As the popularity of cloud storage services grows rapidly, it is desirable and even essential for both legacy and new end-user applications to have the cloud storage capability to improve their functionality, usability, and accessibility. However, incorporating the cloud storage capability into applications must be done in a secure manner to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of users' data in the cloud. Unfortunately, it is non-trivial for ordinary application developers to either enhance legacy applications or build new applications to properly have the secure cloud storage capability, due to the development efforts involved as well as the security knowledge and skills required. In this paper, we propose SafeSky, a middleware that can immediately enable an application to use the cloud storage services securely and efficiently, without any code modification or recompilation. A SafeSky-enabled application does not need to save a user's data to the local disk, but instead securely saves them to different cloud storage services to significantly enhance the data security. We have implemented SafeSky as a shared library on Linux. SafeSky supports applications written in different languages, supports various popular cloud storage services, and supports common user authentication methods used by those services. Our evaluation and analysis of SafeSky with real-world applications demonstrate that SafeSky is a feasible and practical approach for equipping end-user applications with the secure cloud storage capability.