Secure and Controlled Sharing of Data in Distributed Computing

Abstract

In today's world, there is a strong need for sharing big data for collaboration. However, privacy and security remains a barrier especially when dealing with massive amounts of data in the Cloud. In particular, there is a growing need for the data owner to gain better access control over their data. The data owner should be able to specify how their data should be viewed, copied and modified. A dishonest authorised user may illegally redistribute the data to other friends and/or colleagues who don't have the relevant access permissions. In this paper, we address these issues by introducing the idea of SafeShare which controls how data can be accessed and used. SafeShare encapsulate data in self-controlling objects (SCO's) and additionally monitors operations of the user. We demonstrate that our SafeShare system will prevent the user from carrying out any illegal operations including illegal redistribution of data. In addition, we add another level of security on the SCO's by adding a log file and hash for better auditing control.