Chaavi: A Privacy Preserving architecture for Webmail Systems

The last two decades have seen major innovations in the Internet and transformation of the way people do business, communicate and live. Concomitant with the Internet bringing the advantages of new services, is a growing awareness of threats to Privacy that the Internet can enable. When considered in this context, the Cloud Computing paradigm requires users forgive disturbing levels of trust by users in the servers that hold their information. There is a pressing need for innovative architectures to allow the user to rely on the server with little or no need for trust in the service provider. In this work, we give an introduction of privacy issues in Cloud Computing and discuss the state of art in the privacy enhancing technologies that can be used for Cloud Computing. We focus on webmail services and propose a privacy preserving architecture in which users can retain their mail in the servers of their service providers in a cloud without compromising functionality or privacy.We benchmark our system and present the results showing that it is feasible to architect a privacy preserving solution for webmail systems.