Hiding in the Clouds and Building a Stealth Communication Network
This addresses privacy concerns for users of online communication networks, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing cloud storage and secure communication concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling stealthy communication to protect user data from service providers and authorities by proposing a theoretical framework and implementing an instance called Secret-Share using cloud storage, but no concrete performance numbers are provided.
Social networks, instant messages and file sharing systems are common communication means among friends, families, coworkers, etc. Due to concerns of personal privacy, identify thefts, data misuse, freedom of speech and government surveillance, online social or communication networks have provided various options for a user to guard or control his or her personal data. However, for most these services, user data are still accessible by the service providers, which can lead to both liability issues if data breach occurs at the server side and data misuse by the network administrators. To prevent service providers from accessing user data, secure end-to-end user communication is a must, like the one provided by WhatsApp. On the other hand, the services provided by such communication network can still be interfered by an authority. For a communication network to be stealthy, the following features are essential: (1) oblivious service, (2) complete user control and flexibility, and (3) lightweight. In this paper, we first discuss the features and benefits of a stealth communication network (SNET), and then we propose a theoretical framework that can be adopted to implement an SNET. By utilizing the framework and the existing publicly available cloud storage, we present the implementation details of an instance of SNET, named Secret-Share. Last but not least, we discuss the current limitations of Secret-Share and its potential extensions.