PPL v2.0: Uniform Data Access and Usage Control on Cloud and Mobile

Cloud storage is one of the most popular categories of market services. It provides an easy means for consumers to store and share their data, also in mobility through convenient apps. However, such valuable functionality raises several security concerns. Among them, the risk of sensitive information disclosure or, for professional data, the risk of compliance violations. In this paper, we propose an access and usage control framework for seamless, uniform and secure data sharing across cloud and mobile which keeps data under the control of its owner, that expresses preferences according to privacy or security needs. To our knowledge, this is the first effort addressing simultaneously and consistently cloud and mobile platforms. Our proposal offers access and usage control of managed resources relying on the security policy languages XACML and PPL (extended to make use of cloud and mobile contextual information) and on specific engines (cloud, mobile) to enforce them. A use case is presented, to illustrate the framework in action.