Sharing Secure Documents in the Cloud - A Secure Layer for Google Docs

With the advent of Web 2.0, end users generate and share more and more content. One of the most representative services in this context is the collaborative edition of online documents. This service is commonly provided through Cloud Computing as Software as a Service. However, the Cloud paradigm still requires users to place their trust in Cloud providers with regard to privacy. This is the case of Google Docs, a very popular service without privacy support for the documents stored on its servers. In this paper we present and discuss a secure layer to guarantee privacy of shared Google Docs documents. To our knowledge, this is one of the first approaches to private shared edition with real Cloud tools.