CageCoach: Sharing-Oriented Redaction-Capable Distributed Cryptographic File System

TL;DR

CageCoach is a distributed cryptographic file system designed to facilitate safe, scalable, and redaction-capable data sharing, simplifying access control and protecting user data in modern sharing environments.

Contribution

It introduces CageCoach, a novel sharing-oriented distributed cryptographic file system that integrates redaction and simplified access control for secure data sharing.

Findings

Enables safe data sharing with redaction capabilities

Simplifies access control for read-only data sharing

Achieves efficient and scalable data sharing in distributed environments

Abstract

The modern data economy is built on sharing data. However, sharing data can be an expensive and risky endeavour. Existing sharing systems like Distributed File Systems provide full read, write, and execute Role-based Access Control (RBAC) for sharing data, but can be expensive and difficult to scale. Likewise such systems operate on a binary access model for their data, either a user can read all the data or read none of the data. This approach is not necessary for a more read-only oriented data landscape, and one where data contains many dimensions that represent a risk if overshared. In order to encourage users to share data and smooth out the process of accessing such data a new approach is needed. This new approach must simplify the RBAC of older DFS approaches to something more read-only and something that integrates redaction for user protections. To accomplish this we present CageCoach, a simple sharing-oriented Distributed Cryptographic File System (DCFS). CageCoach leverages the simplicity and speed of basic HTTP, linked data concepts, and automatic redaction systems to facilitate safe and easy sharing of user data. The implementation of CageCoach is available at https://github.umn.edu/CARPE415/CageCoach.