Lifetime Privacy and Self-Destruction of Data in the Cloud

Data privacy protection is one of the primary concerns and major challenges for online services, such as cloud computing and outsourced data center. The concern is getting serious with the computing practices shifting towards cloud computing. Once user data is uploaded, end users are hard to guarantee that the data is protected and can be completely destructed by any means. Users can only rely on blind trust on the online service vendors. However, the privacy of user data can be compromised in multiple ways including careless operations of cloud administrators, bugs and vulnerabilities inside cloud infrastructure and even malicious cloud vendors. In this research, we seek to provide users with a concrete way to protect or destroy uploaded data. We utilize the technique of trusted computing as the trusted root in the hardware layer, and the hypervisor as the trusted agent in the software layer. The trusted hypervisor is responsible for protecting sensitive user data or destructing them at users command. Even administrators of the cloud cannot bypass the protection. This paper presents Dissolver, a novel system that keeps the data privacy in the whole life-time and ensures the destruction at the users command. Performance evaluation shows that the prototype system imposes reasonably low runtime overhead.