Real Time Collaborative Encryption: Client-Side Encryption On Google Docs

Speaker/Bio

Yihao Hu is a rising undergraduate senior studying computer engineering and electrical engineering.

Abstract

Google Docs is a widely used online real time collaborative editing tool. Though many enjoy the convenience brought by such web app, their use of the app also exposes potentially private content to the service provider, hackers, or authorized (or unauthorized) third parties. Standard privacy-preserving technologies do not translate well into this collaborative regime because of the (often obfuscated) real-time collaboration protocols employed and the complex structure of data. Yet all hope is not lost … in this talk we review approaches for enabling client-side encryption of data within collaborative environments without affecting the user experience. We examine practical implementations of these approaches, and present a proof-of-concept demo resulting from research over the past two months. We conclude with some potential broader applications of the project.