An Efficient Safe Directory Based File Protection Mechanism

Sensitive information leakage in files is one of the biggest concerns in people's life. Considering this situation, people have designed lots of tools to protect sensitive files. However, these specialized tools are not applicable when the user amount is small. This paper proposes a novel light-weight mechanism that provides efficient and fast cryptographic-based file protection to meet the need of small organizations. The highlights are its ability to provide protection for all types of files, and the usage of an efficient access control approach for file sharing. Operations in the directory are monitored in real time and files are protected automatically. Moreover, encryption keys are generated and well preserved by a hierarchical key generation algorithm. For further estimation, we conducted experiments and analyzed the security and performance of our mechanism as well as other file protection software, and then we made a comparison among them. Experimental results show that our mechanism performs well both in security and performance and outperforms those other file protection software when applied in small organizations.