privateBook: Encrypting User Data with Attribute-Based Encryption Using Privacy Policies

Boston College Computer Science Senior Thesis, presented to the department April 5, 2014

The paper can be found here.

Abstract:

As the internet and cloud services have pervaded our lives in nearly every aspect, one of the biggest issues facing the populace today is finding the best ways to protect our privacy. An important part of protection for the average user of a service is their privacy policy: essentially the only way today to let a client define how their data is used by the server. But often a client is not given a choice, and sometimes their policy is not even followed. We present here privateBook, a prototype for encrypting user data such that they first create a privacy policy, and their data is protected from even the service unless their privacy requirements are met by the service.

Attribute-Based Encryption library provided by the Charm crypto library.

privateBook web app built in Python with the Django web framework.