LawCrypt: Secret Sharing for Attorney-Client Data in a Multi-Provider Cloud Architecture

Abstract

The accelerated employment of cloud computing among law firms is due to multiple benefits, including wide accessibility and inter-organizational information sharing. Nevertheless, the project’s preliminary case study revealed lawyers’ mass neglect of standard precautionary measures and, consequently, a high proportion of security breaches, putting confidential and important documents at risk. The goal of the multi-provider cloud secret sharing architecture was to ensure confidentiality, availability, and integrity of attorney documents while maintaining greater efficiency than traditional encryption algorithms. After an exhaustive development phase involving considerable testing and optimizations, software assessments of the architecture indicate the low computational overhead of adding the secret-sharing approach to a multi-provider law firm sharing environment. The efficient combination of constructions satisfies the engineering criteria as ChaCha20-Poly1305 warrants authenticity and privacy, and secret sharing ensures availability and perfect privacy. Compared with AES in CFB mode, widely used for encrypting data in the Cloud today, the secret sharing implementation boasts almost a 40% improvement over all file sizes. The only possible way of compromising this system is if multiple cloud providers collude, which is still unlikely given that the documents are additionally encrypted.