Privacy Aware Web Services in the Cloud

Data privacy and security continues to hinder wider adoption of cloud based web services for small to medium businesses. Existing privacy aware systems for cloud environments either assume that web service providers are trustworthy and can adequately enforce a client's privacy policies or adapt computationally expensive encryption techniques to minimize data security risks. In this paper, we propose, PASiC, a framework for Privacy Aware RESTful Web Services in the Cloud. PASiC provides lightweight data privacy features by allowing clients to define their specific privacy policies, obfuscation/encryption methods and collaboratively engage with the service providers to enforce these policies. Our framework is designed to facilitate integration with legacy systems. Our experimental evaluation shows that PASiC safeguards sensitive data throughout the data staging process, and show how it operates over different methods of encryption and obfuscation in terms of their performance.