Moving Privacy-Sensitive Services from Public Clouds to Decentralized Private Clouds

Today's public cloud services suffer from fundamental privacy issues, e.g., as demonstrated by the global surveillance disclosures. The lack of privacy in cloud computing stems from its inherent centrality. State-of-the-art approaches that increase privacy for cloud services either operate cloud-like services on user's devices or encrypt data prior to upload to the cloud. However, these techniques jeopardize advantages of the cloud such as elasticity of processing resources. In contrast, we propose decentralized private clouds to allow users to protect their privacy and still benefit from the advantages of cloud computing. Our approach utilizes idle resources of friends and family to realize a trusted, decentralized system in which cloud services can be operated securely and privacy-preserving. We discuss our approach and substantiate its feasibility with initial experiments.