Achievement

Trainee Matt Tierney is working on a project that aims to build an efficient, secure and encrypted DropBox system that aims to provide the same file manipulation primitives as a traditional DropBox while placing little trust on the cloud storage. The key challenges are:

(a) how to provide a highly efficient and lightweight system that can perform encrypted file system operations with minimal overhead;

(b) how to handle key management in the face of group dynamicity where the read/write permissions on files dynamically change with time;

(c) what is right model for handling versioning and file updates in an encrypted Dropbox environment? Matt has built an initial version of the Safe-Deposit Box system and the current version has been released as an open source codebase on Google code. The code is available at: http://code.google.com/p/safe-deposit-box/