SecureSafe: a highly secure online data safe industrial use case

Abstract

In this paper, we present the core security architecture of SecureSafe, a cloud service that provides a highly secure online storage for sensitive data. The architecture combines best practices in cryptography and security protocols with novel approaches to offer high security while providing good usability and performance. More than two years of successful operation with many satisfied customers and no security incidents demonstrate the soundness of the architecture. In addition to granting insight into the security architecture of a field-proven service to provide inputs for other services that have similar requirements, there's another motivation for this paper: We believe that to increase trust in cloud services, service providers should be more open about internal security details -- although this is in contrast to what typical cloud service providers do today.