The paper entitled “Secure Cloud Storage with Client-Side Encryption Using a Trusted Execution Environment”, developed by the student Marciano da Rocha, under the advisory of professors Rodrigo Tomaz Pagno and Newton Carlos Will, was considered one of the best papers presented at the 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2020).

The very best papers presented at this event are selected by the conference and program chairs of the event based on a number of criteria that include the classifications and comments provided by the program committee members, the session chairs’ assessment and also the chairs’ global view of all papers included in the technical program.

The aforementioned paper presents the use of data sealing feature, provided by the Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) technology, for file encryption. A virtual file system is created in which applications can store their data, keeping the security guarantees provided by the Intel SGX technology, before send the data to a storage provider. This way, even if the storage provider is compromised, the data are safe.

To validate the proposal, the Cryptomator software, which is a free client-side encryption tool for cloud files, was integrated with an Intel SGX application (enclave) for data sealing. The results demonstrate that the solution is feasible, in terms of performance and security, and can be expanded and refined for practical use and integration with cloud synchronization services.

The authors were invited to send a revised and extended version of their paper for publication in the Communications in Computer and Information Science. The work presented at the conference can be accessed here.