To enhance privacy, CLARUS implements a set of privacy-enabling mechanisms to ensure that the user’s sensitive data are properly protected before they are outsourced to the cloud. Protection is provided in a way that cloud service functionalities are still preserved, even those that require performing operations (e.g. queries, transformations, calculations) on the protected data.
Regarding data encryption, CLARUS, has explored methods to execute SQL queries over encrypted databases, providing a framework that supports private search queries over encrypted SQL databases.
Besides that, the data anonymisation and data splitting methods also applied in CLARUS, constitute a main innovation of CLARUS to enhance the security in cloud services, and they significantly outperform standard cryptographic techniques in terms of e.g. efficiency, flexibility of operations and of data access, and utility for CSPs. To the best of our knowledge, no other projects or existing commercial solutions for securing cloud transactions have considered this kind of solutions.
CLARUS impact will be significant with the definition of privacy-preserving mechanisms, which will provide security assurance and user control of outsourced data in order to build trust in the cloud, without impairing functionalities such as ubiquitous access with heterogeneous devices, including mobile ones. Control of the security mechanisms applied to outsourced data will be given to data owners themselves, together with the auditing mechanisms necessary to discover and manage incidents and build the required trust in the cloud. The beneficiaries of the CLARUS solution will be, on the one side, potential cloud end users like companies, public organisations and e-government administrations, which could thereby be motivated to embrace the benefits of trusted cloud services, and on the other side the CSPs themselves, because the CLARUS solution might motivate more users to move to the cloud, which implies a market opportunity for CSPs
