Cloud storage providers like Gmail and Dropbox may soon get a major upgrade that will enable them to better manage their users’ content, giving them more storage capacity, but with the same level of security.
For cloud storage providers to protect an ever-increasing amount of private data, they have to encrypt that information so that no one – including the service provider itself – can read it. The issue with this is that cloud storage services end up having an exceptionally hard time efficiently managing that large amount of data and providing users with better storage capacity.
Research from 2010 has suggested that up to 75 percent of all produced data is actually duplicated. Recently, owners of an open source “deduplication” solution suggested that reducing that duplicated data could clear up to 95% of storage space. The problem is, for cloud storage services to remove (“deduplicate”) data, they need to be able to recognize it without violating users’ privacy.
Now, a team of researchers at A*STAR Data Storage Institute in Singapore has managed to develop a system called HEDup that allows cloud storage providers to recognize data without sacrificing clients’ security.
The new system works by using a separate key server that assigns a secure key to the data that will be encrypted and then uploaded for storage. Because duplicate data will have the same key (can only be accessed for encryption and decryption purposes by data owners), the cloud storage provider can then use homomorphic encryption to determine – without actually reading the data – whether the information is a duplicate.
Source:
ScienceDaily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170429212501.htm)
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