Remote access for personal cloud devices

Abstract

With the developments in cloud computing, there have been raising concerns towards the privacy of content stored in the cloud. People tend to steer towards personal cloud devices as they improve the locality of data by holding such cloud devices in the vicinity, in order to ensure data privacy. These devices are mostly found in the form of Network-attached Storages (NAS) that are accessible within the local network. Although there are gains in security and privacy, numerous drawbacks exist among personal cloud devices when compared to cloud-based solutions. One major drawback is the remote access to content and sharing of content with remote users. A popular method of sharing media to remote users is the generation of a link, which is globally accessible through a centralized server. The proposed solution implements a link sharing mechanism, an online cross platform file browser and a remote access control mechanism which uses end-to-end encrypted tunnels to communicate in a peer-to-peer manner. This solution makes use of WebRTC which utilizes Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) to ensure encrypted delivery of data. The presented text contains the experimental setup, user interfaces and results obtained after evaluating the performance of the proposed system.