A New Sharing Paradigm for the Personal Cloud

Abstract

Pushed by recent legislation and smart disclosure initiatives, personal cloud solutions emerge and hold the promise of giving the control back to the individual on her data. However, this shift leaves the privacy and security issues in user’s hands, a role that few people can properly endorse. Considering the inadequacy of existing sharing models, we advocate the definition of a new sharing paradigm dedicated to the personal cloud context. This sharing paradigm, called SWYSWYK (Share What You See with Who You Know), allows to derive intuitive sharing rules from the personal cloud content, to self-administer the subjects and the sensitive permissions, and to visualize the net effects of the sharing policy on the user’s personal cloud. We then propose a reference architecture providing the users tangible guarantees about the enforcement of the SWYSWYK policies. An instance of this architecture has been implemented on top of an existing personal cloud platform to demonstrate the practicality of the approach.