Collaboration-Preserving authenticated encryption for operational transformation systems

  • Authors:
  • Michael Clear;Karl Reid;Desmond Ennis;Arthur Hughes;Hitesh Tewari

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland;School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

  • Venue:
  • ISC'12 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Information Security
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

We present a flexible approach for achieving user-controlled privacy and integrity of documents that are collaboratively authored within web-based document-editing applications. In this setting, the goal is to provide security without modifying the web application's client-side or server-side components. Instead, communication between both components is transparently intercepted and processed (if necessary) by means of a local proxy or browser plugin. We improve upon existing solutions by securely preserving real-time collaboration for encrypted documents and facilitating self-containment of the metadata (an overhead of encryption) within the same document. An architectural generalization is also presented that permits generic transformations and fine-grained access control. Security is assessed with respect to several threat models, and performance is evaluated alongside other approaches.