research-article

Private Document Editing with some Trust

Authors:

Aaron MacSween,

Caleb James Delisle,

Paul Libbrecht,

Yann FloryAuthors Info & Claims

DocEng '18: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2018

Article No.: 29, Pages 1 - 10

https://doi.org/10.1145/3209280.3209535

Published: 28 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Document editing has migrated in the last decade from a mostly individual activity to a shared activity among multiple persons. The World Wide Web and other communication means have contributed to this evolution. However, collaboration via the web has shown a tendency to centralize information, making it accessible to subsequent uses and abuses, such as surveillance, marketing, and data theft.

Traditionally, access control policies have been enforced by a central authority, usually the server hosting the content, a single point of failure. We describe a novel scheme for collaborative editing in which clients enforce access control through the use of strong encryption. Encryption keys are distributed as the portion of a URI which is not shared with the server, enabling users to adopt a variety of document security workflows. This system separates access to the information ("the key") from the responsibility of hosting the content ("the carrier of the vault"), allowing privacy-conscious editors to enjoy a modern collaborative editing experience without relaxing their requirements.

The paper presents CryptPad, an open-source reference implementation which features a variety of editors which employ the described access control methodology. We will detail approaches for implementing a variety of features required for user productivity in a manner that satisfies user-defined privacy concerns.

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Cited By

Galanou ABindlish KPreibsch LPignolet YFetzer CKapitza R(2023)Trustworthy confidential virtual machines for the massesProceedings of the 24th International Middleware Conference10.1145/3590140.3629124(316-328)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3590140.3629124

Index Terms

Private Document Editing with some Trust
1. Security and privacy
  1. Software and application security
    1. Web application security

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cover image ACM Conferences

DocEng '18: Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2018

August 2018

311 pages

ISBN:9781450357692

DOI:10.1145/3209280

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 28 August 2018

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DocEng '18: ACM Symposium on Document Engineering 2018

August 28 - 31, 2018

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Overall Acceptance Rate 178 of 537 submissions, 33%

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Cited By

Galanou ABindlish KPreibsch LPignolet YFetzer CKapitza R(2023)Trustworthy confidential virtual machines for the massesProceedings of the 24th International Middleware Conference10.1145/3590140.3629124(316-328)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3590140.3629124

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