In this talk, we argue that overcoming the privacy challenges of cloud computing requires cooperation between the various actors in the cloud computing landscape, i.e., users, service providers, and infrastructure providers. All these different actors have clear incentives to cater for privacy but often lack the technical means to do so. We provide an overview over technical approaches that enable each of them to account for privacy. We specifically focus on two contributions in more detail:
To support users in exercising their privacy, we raise awareness for their exposure to cloud services in the context of email services as well as smartphone apps and enable users to compare their cloud usage to their peers anonymously. By providing privacy requirements-aware cloud infrastructure, we realise user-specified per-data item privacy policies and enable infrastructure providers to adhere to them when storing data in the cloud. Our contributions highlight the potential of applying cooperation of different actors to strengthen users’ privacy and hence eventually enable more corporate and private users to benefit from cloud computing.
Martin Henze is a final year PhD candidate working as researcher as well as head of security and privacy at the Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems at RWTH Aachen University. His research focuses on security and privacy in large-scale communication systems, especially cloud computing, the Internet of Things, and distributed ledgers. After finishing his diploma studies (equiv. M.Sc.) of computer science at RWTH Aachen University in 2011, he spent three months as a research intern at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg. Martin has worked in several third-party funded research projects, often in interdisciplinary or international contexts, and has co-authored about 40 peer-reviewed scientific publications. In 2017, he received the ICT Young Researcher Award from RWTH Aachen University.