Data Protection in the Cloud - The MimoSecco Approach

Cloud Computing is a technology with vast impact on IT systems. Costs can be significantly reduced through on demand purchase of CPU time, memory and storage, offering high flexibility. The main reason to avoid cloud technology still is security. This leads to a lack of trust in cloud services. Most cloud providers secure their systems only against external adversaries by using firewalls and secure connections. Internal adversaries, however, remain a big threat in this scenario. Especially when using mobile devices as clients, usable security with a low performance impact remains a challenge. In this paper, we present concepts for using software as a service with mobile devices while guaranteeing a high level of data protection. MimoSecco uses an innovative encryption scheme and hard to clone secure hardware to guarantee data protection. Top secret data is encrypted directly, processible confidential data is encrypted and fragmented by the database proxy and transferred to different servers. Context based access control makes the misuse of mobile devices for unauthorized data access difficult. These set of measures raises the privacy level of cloud computing significantly.