A research project led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) aiming at enhancing security and privacy for cloud storage has been awarded HKD5.98 million from the Collaborative Research Fund of the Research Grants Council in the 2016–17 exercise.

 

This successful application recognises our research excellence and highlights our capacity to lead projects in collaborative research across disciplines and across institutions.

 

Over the past decade more and more organisations and institutions have started to adopt the public cloud for storage and big data analytics infrastructure. But there are growing concerns about data security and privacy as traditional data security and privacy technologies can no longer cope with the new challenges.

 

“This project focuses on developing new security and privacy-enhancing technologies for cloud storage that specifically address the challenges brought up by big data, characterised by high volume, high variety and high velocity,” said Professor Jia Xiaohua, Chair Professor of Computer Science, CityU and Principal Investigator of the project, which is titled “Security and Privacy-enhancing Technologies for Cloud Storage of Big Data”.

“Our research findings will enable users to conveniently search encrypted data, easily verify results from data analytics, and reliably use mobile devices to access cloud services without worrying about security breach,” he added.

 

The objectives are threefold: first, to design new architecture and algorithms for searching encrypted big data; second, to design new frameworks and technologies for integrity assurance in big data analytics; third, to develop new schemes and techniques for privacy-preserving data acquisition and secure mobile frontend devices.

 

“Besides the protection of backend cloud storage, we also aim at designing mechanisms to secure the mobile service frontend for users. One of such tasks is to develop a cross-system flow control framework to label and scrutinize the traffic between mobile service frontend and cloud,” said Dr Wang Cong, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the key investigator of the project.

 

“We believe this research will give users confidence in the use of cloud storage systems, without which the true power of cloud storage cannot be fully unleashed,” Dr Wang commented.

 

The project brings together interdisciplinary experts from four universities in Hong Kong. In addition to Professor Jia and Dr Wang from CityU, experts in cloud and distributed systems, information security and databases from Hong Kong Baptist University, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and The University of Hong Kong are involved.

  

 

 

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Caption: Professor Jia Xiaohua (right) and Dr Wang Cong (left).

 

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