ARCHISTAR: Towards Secure and Robust Cloud Based Data Sharing

Cloud based collaboration gives rise to many new applications and business opportunities in both the private and the business domain. However, building such systems in a secure and robust manner is a challenging task. In this paper, we present a new architecture for secure cloud based data sharing called ARCHISTAR. It builds upon a distributed storage system and thus avoids any single point of trust or failure. Besides providing confidentiality of data, our focus is on availability and in particular on robustness against active attacks or failures. Our system provides full multi-user support and enables advanced sharing scenarios without complex key management and revocation mechanisms. We also present a prototype implementation of the ARCHISTAR system and discuss open issues.