Accounting for privacy in the cloud computing landscape

Viac o knihe

While cloud computing offers numerous benefits, it also presents significant privacy challenges, highlighted by recent security breaches. This dissertation argues that addressing these challenges requires collaboration among users, service providers, and infrastructure providers, each of whom has incentives to prioritize privacy. The work presents technical approaches to help these actors enhance privacy. Firstly, we raise awareness among users regarding their exposure to cloud services, particularly in email and smartphone apps, allowing them to anonymously compare their cloud usage with peers. Secondly, we introduce privacy requirements-aware cloud infrastructure, enabling users to specify per-data item privacy policies that infrastructure providers can implement. Our third contribution supports service providers in creating privacy-preserving cloud services for the Internet of Things by facilitating the transparent processing of protected data and proposing a distributed architecture to secure control over devices and networks. Finally, we suggest a decentralized cloud infrastructure that allows users who distrust cloud providers to shift certain services away from the cloud through cooperation with other users. These contributions collectively aim to empower all actors in the cloud computing ecosystem to better manage privacy.