CloudProtect: A Middleware for Managing Privacy in Web and Cloud Data Services

Cloud computing and web based data services (WDSs) have increased significantly in recent years. Examples of such services include Google Calendar, Microsoft HealthVault, and Yahoo Briefcase. Many such services do not offer any control to the end users to manage the privacy and confidentiality of data stored at the service providers. We propose CloudProtect, a middleware that sits between the client and service provider applications empowering users with the ability to manage their security and privacy needs for these web and cloud data services. The middleware enables the tradeoff analysis between data privacy, usability, and efficiency. We implemented CloudProtect and adapted it to work with Google Calendar and Google Docs. Our experimental results highlight the feasibility of the approach.