Secure Collaborative Editing Using Secret Sharing

Abstract

With the advent of cloud-based collaborative editing, there have been security and privacy concerns about user data since the users are not the sole owners of the data stored over the cloud. Most secure collaborative editing solutions thus employ the use of AES to secure user content. In this work, we explore the use of secret sharing to maintain the confidentiality of user data in a collaborative document. We establish that using secret sharing provides an average increase of 56.01% in performance over AES with a single set of coefficients and an average performance increase of 30.37% with multiple sets of coefficients, while not requiring maintenance and distribution of symmetric keys as in the case of AES. We discuss the incorporation of keyword-based search with the proposed framework and present the operability and security analysis.