INESC TEC’s High Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab) is leading a European project called SafeCloud – Secure and Resilient Cloud Architecture, where the goal is to protect the data on the cloud, guaranteeing the safety of the current services of cloud computing infrastructures, regardless of who owns the servers and the computers where the information is stored.

In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee, leaked the USA’s surveillance programmes stating that he did not want to live in a world where everything he said or did was recorded. In 2014, several photos of celebrities, such as Jennifer Lawrence, were leaked after being stored on the iCloud.

It is precisely to prevent the violation of encrypted data in websites such as Google or Microsoft that the European Commission with be providing €3M to fund the SafeCloud.

“There are countless failures in the cloud computing services provided  today, as they do not make it possible to guarantee complete privacy, integrity and security of the data of millions of clients. That is one of the issues we want to address”, explains Rui Oliveira, member of the Board of INESC TEC and the person in charge of SafeCloud.

The main goal of the project is to correct these failures and to guarantee that the users of cloud computing services are assured that their data are processed and stored in a completely safe and private way.

“Users will not only be protected from hackers, but computing service providers will also be prevented from wrongfully using the data stored, for example, to sell private information to other entities”, Rui Oliveira states. 

“One of the greatest problems with the current solutions is that the clients’ data are processed and stored by a single external unit. This unit cannot be controlled and is oftentimes out of the clients’ legal jurisdiction”, the researcher explains.

The SafeCloud is an innovative project whose goal is to allow the transmission, processing and storage of data to be distributed by the different cloud computing service suppliers. This way it is possible to guarantee that each client’s data remains safe as long as the administrative domains do not collude.

Another feature of the project will be an anticensorship mechanism that makes it impossible for any external organisation or malicious users to access the data from clients,  and to censure and modify  the information without going unnoticed.

Application will be developed during the 1^st trimester of 2016

A SafeCloud app for smartphones and tablets will be launched in the first trimester of 2016. The app will be free and will focus particularly on photos in different platforms and operating systems. The goal with this tool is to draw attention to the goals of this project.

According to Rui Oliveira, who is leading the project, the app mathematically guarantees the safety of the files. The goal with the project is to provide a sort of replacement for Dropbox or Google Drive, guaranteeing safety.

The team

About 30 researchers from INESC TEC, INESC-ID and Maxdata Software (Portugal), the Université de Neuchatel (Switzerland), Technische Universität München and Cloud & Heat GMBH (Germany), and Cybernetica AS (Estonia), are working on this project, which will be concluded in August 2018.

The INESC TEC team is composed of Rui Oliveira, Manuel Barbosa, José Pereira, Miguel Matos, Ricardo Vilaça, João Paulo, Francisco Maia, Bernardo Portela and Ana Nunes.

For more information on the SafeCloud go to http://www.safecloud-project.eu/

The researchers mentioned in this news piece area associated with U.Minho and INESC TEC.

INESC TEC, November 2015