UPSS: a User-centric Private Storage System with its applications

Abstract

Strong confidentiality, integrity, user control, reliability and performance are critical requirements in privacy-sensitive applications. Such applications would benefit from a data storage and sharing infrastructure that provides these properties even in decentralized topologies with untrusted storage backends, but users today are forced to choose between systemic security properties and system reliability or performance. As an alternative to this status quo we present UPSS: the user-centric private sharing system, a cryptographic storage system that can be used as a conventional filesystem or as the foundation for security-sensitive applications such as redaction with integrity and private revision control. We demonstrate that both the security and performance properties of UPSS exceed that of existing cryptographic filesystems and that its performance is comparable to mature conventional filesystems - in some cases, even superior. Whether used directly via its Rust API or as a conventional filesystem, UPSS provides strong security and practical performance on untrusted storage.