WEBCLOUD: INTERNET LINKED CLOUD REPOSITORY FOR PROTECTED INFORMATION EXCHANGE ACROSS SYSTEM

Abstract

With the rapid migration of data to cloud platforms, ensuring the privacy and security of user information has become a critical challenge. While client-side encryption/decryption offers a promising solution, existing approaches suffer from three key limitations: weak protection due to low-entropy PIN-based encryption, inefficient data sharing with conventional cryptographic schemes, and limited usability requiring dedicated software or plugins. To address these issues, we propose Web Cloud, a practical browser-based encryption framework that leverages modern web technologies to provide secure, efficient, and cross-platform data protection. Web Cloud introduces robust features including immediate user revocation, high-speed processing through offline encryption, and outsourced decryption to reduce computational overhead. The system operates seamlessly on any device equipped with a web user agent—ranging from browsers to mobile and desktop applications—ensuring broad accessibility without additional plugins. Our implementation, built on ownCloud for file management and enhanced with Web Assembly and the Web Cryptography API, integrates complex cryptographic operations efficiently. Experimental evaluation across popular browsers, Android, and PC applications demonstrates that Web Cloud achieves both high performance and strong security. Additionally, the framework inherently supports a practical ciphertext-policy attribute-based key encapsulation mechanism (CP-AB-KEM), extending its applicability to diverse secure data sharing scenarios