#TALK

Cloud Encryption with Cryptomator – Privacy Protection for Everyone

Current and past political events have initiated an extensive discussion on privacy and informational self-determination. The vast majority of consumers states their desire to keep personal data private while in everyday life, they use services and approve privacy agreements that undermine their informational self-determination on a large scale. This contradiction is referred to as the privacy paradox. While there are tools designed to keep personal data private, employing such tools is often associated with reduced functionality and/or usability and new privacy issues resulting from their use. Such deficiencies inhibit their widespread use.

Hacktivism

Cloud storages are one example for a privacy-critical infrastructure as personal data is distributed across a broad network while the location of storage is often out of the user’s control. Client-side (end-to-end) encryption is a valid way to protect those data independent of security measures taken by the cloud provider and its privacy agreements. However, existing tools – e.g., for disk or file encryption – do not work seamlessly with the cloud.

The idea behind Cryptomator is to make cloud encryption as user-friendly, transparent, and understandable as possible to enable everyone to protect their data. In their talk, the developers of Cryptomator emphasize the importance of privacy in our information society in general and the significance of sophisticated and user-friendly tools to empower everyone to safeguard their privacy in particular. The general idea behind Cryptomator, its encryption scheme and challenges when targeting the cloud will be outlined. In addition, the architecture of the application and future development plans will be illustrated.