Mobistore: Secure Cloud-like Storage on Mobile Devices

Abstract

With the rise of smart phones and tablets and the ubiquitous use of computers in daily life, the number of computing devices a user interacts with in a day has grown dramatically in recent years. This growth has led to numerous inconveniences for the user, one of the largest being the difficulty of accessing their data across all the devices they use. While one solution for this is cloud storage services such as Drop box or iCloud, these services are not without drawbacks, such as the need to constant, fast internet connectivity and security issues such as recently publicized hacks of iCloud and secret government accesses of a number of services. In this paper we introduce a new system which takes advantage of the ubiquitous use of smart phones to provide a cloud-like storage service that opportunistically pushes updates to other machines based on location. This system provides similar constant access to user data, while avoiding many of the drawbacks of cloud storage.