SURGE : the Secure Cloud Storage and Collaboration Framework

Abstract

SURGE is a Secure Cloud Storage and Collaboration Framework that is designed to be easy for application developers to use. The motivation is to allow application developers to mimic existing cloud based applications, but make them cryptographically secure, in addition to allowing application developers to come up with entirely new secure cloud based applications. SURGE stores all of its data as operations and as a result can leverage techniques like Operational Transforms to allow offline usage as well as lowering network bandwidth consumption. Additionally, storing data as operations allows SURGE to develop a rich permissions system. This permission system allows basic permissions such as read-only, read-write, and administrator in addition to more advanced permissions such as write-only, group read/write, and anonymous permissions. To evaluate the usability of SURGE a C# prototype was constructed and used to create a collaborative text editor that performs well under real-world user tests.