Inspiration
Cloud storage solutions are great, and add a lot of convenience and functionality, but can you trust your cloud service provider with your sensitive data? Cloud providers often snoop through your documents and photos.
"The biggest risk is giving up control of your data to someone else using different data centres in remote places," says Gavan Egan, managing director of cloud and IT solutions for global telecoms giant, Verizon. "What happens in the event of a disaster? You're also putting your data next to someone else's."
Amazon web services' success is due to their competitive pricing model, charging only for what clients use. Having many clients share resource pools saves on computer resources, and keeps costs down for the cloud, at the potential cost of security. Despite having server-side encryption, Amazon still has access to your files, but this does protect your data from being breached. According to BBC News, less than 10% of the world's data is currently stored in the cloud. Businesses and consumers alike aren't quick to trust their data in someone else's hands, but the cost of deploying and managing your own cloud computing solution is costly.
Encrypty is the solution. With all encryption done client side, users can be sure that their data is secure, and cant be viewed by their cloud host. This also mitigates the risk of a data breach of the cloud host. With most cloud providers featuring an API, integration of Encrypty could be done in current work environments. this expands the functionality and reachability of this application. Moving forward, Encrypty could offer expanded features that were familiar with today, such as file versioning with differencing, shared file directories, or its own cloud service.
What it does
Encrypts files client side, before uploading to the cloud, and decrypts downloaded files on the fly. With all of the heavy lifting being done on the client side, Encrypty can be used with existing cloud infrastructure. Dropbox, Amazon, Google, and even business cloud solutions could benefit from this solution, and could implement Encrypty. Our project is a proof of concept that the encryption and file management system can all be done client side, making it versatile and able to be implemented almost everywhere.
How we built it
After discussing what technologies we were excited to work with and our previous experience the team utilized our resources and started accomplishing tasks such as setting up the Linux network. The back end code was separated from the front end work and our members took on new frameworks and tried to learn new skills while accomplishing our development workflow incrementally.
Challenges we ran into
Communicating complex design solutions across the entire team became hard to manage. This lack of discussion caused us to have different views of how the overall implementation should be coded.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We have the proof of concept working, we managed to zip files, encrypt them, and upload them to the server. From there, we could pull the files from the server, decrypt them, and unzip them. For the user, this process will be seamless.
What we learned
There was a lot of javascript and json that were new of some of our members. In addition, we wrote the client with ionic and angluar.js, which was pretty new to all of us. Overall, we learned a lot of new things, and we now know how we should implement this application better.
What's next for Encrypty
We would love to continue this project, there is a lot we could improve on. We would like to get a working client that is able to have all of the basic functionality (add , edit , delete , remove , download, and share files) working with four major hosting services, Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
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