New 'Sieve' application to protect your information from hackers

A group of electrical engineers from MIT and Harvard University have collaborated to launch an application which enforces security on smartphone users’ private data. Named as Sieve, it would basically serve as a virtual security guard, whenever any 3rd party application would try to access any private data that is stored in an encrypted form on the cloud. If a user finds it suitable to share the particular data, Sieve would provide a security key that would only decipher certain data. But whenever required, the user can stop the application from accessing data and in that case Sieve will only have to encrypt the data with a new key.

Frank Wang, the first author and a PhD candidate from electrical engineering and computer science department explained that their application would eventually raise awareness among people about hidden data that gets transferred to daily activity trackers or similar applications. On the other hand, it offers flexibility to all the applications which targets information conventionally stored in different places.


Technically, Sieve depends upon two prospective topics of Cryptography, namely attribute-based encryption and key homomorphism. Following database management systems, it exhibits a column-level approach where data can be accessed in a grouped form. Suppose, an application requires only “Name” and “Address”, Sieve will make sure that data from his “Account Number” column is not passed to that same application. However, the team decided to group some data according to the place, time and type to address the slow response limitation of the previous method.

The second method working behind Sieve helps it to revoke an application's access to secured data. Engin Kirda, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University said that commercialisation of such an application might help people to have a control over their personal information. The complete report is to published in the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, which will held this month

Source: Secure, user-controlled data | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology