CloudFilter: practical control of sensitive data propagation to the cloud

Abstract

A major obstacle for the adoption of cloud services in enterprises is the potential loss of control over sensitive data. Companies often have to safeguard a subset of their data because it is crucial to their business or they are required to do so by law. In contrast, cloud service providers handle enterprise data without providing guarantees and may put confidentiality at risk. In order to maintain control over their sensitive data, companies typically block all access to a wide range of cloud services at the network level. Such restrictions significantly reduce employee productivity while offering limited practical protection in the presence of malicious employees. In this paper, we suggest a practical mechanism to ensure that an enterprise maintains control of its sensitive data while employees are allowed to use cloud services. We observe that most cloud services use HTTP as a transport protocol. Since HTTP offers well-defined methods to transfer files, inspecting HTTP messages allows the propagation of data between the enterprise and cloud services to be monitored independently of the implementation of specific cloud services. Our system, CloudFilter, intercepts file transfers to cloud services, performs logging and enforces data propagation policies. CloudFilter controls where files propagate after they have been uploaded to the cloud and ensures that only authorised users may gain access. We show that CloudFilter can be applied to control data propagation to Dropbox and GSS, describing the realistic data propagation policies that it can enforce.