Cloud infrastructure, despite all the advantages and importance to the competitiveness of modern economies, raise fundamental questions about the privacy, integrity, and security of offsite data storage and processing tasks.
These questions have not yet been satisfactorily answered by existing technologies. Furthermore, recent developments in the wake of expansive and, sometimes, unauthorised government access to private and sensitive data raise major privacy and security concerns about data located in the cloud. This is especially worrying when data is physically located, processed, or must transit outside the legal jurisdiction of its rightful owner. All this is exacerbated by providers of cloud services that frequently move and process data without giving notice - and in ways that are detrimental to users and their privacy.
SafeCloud will re-architect cloud infrastructures in order to ensure that data transmission, storage, and processing can be:
- partitioned in multiple administrative domains that are unlikely to collude, so that sensitive data can be protected by design;
- entangled with inter-dependencies that make it impossible for any of the domains to tamper with its integrity.
These two principles (partitioning and entanglement) are applied holistically across the entire data management stack, from communication to storage and processing.
