CeBIT exhibitor Hasso Plattner Institute (Hall 9, Stand D44) and its research partner the Federal Printing Office are developing a distributed e-government service in a pilot project. It’s a kind of “online data safe” for citizens and business, where user data can be safely stored and managed. HPI (https://hpi.de) is to bring its cloud RAID technology to the Trusted Service Platform of the Federal Printing Office, ensuring that users can securely authenticate themselves on the basis of their personal identification. The solution will not only meet all legal requirements but also be easy to use, flexible and with reliable availability. The fact that different cloud providers can be integrated ensures that no one service provider is in sole possession of user data.
HPI shows with its CloudRAID solution how, in contrast to other commercial cloud storage solutions, user data can be stored in a way that makes it unreadable for other servers on the Internet. Here, concepts for the encryption and distribution of data are used that from a purely conceptual standpoint do not allow the data to be read by others (as is the case, for example, with the provider Dropbox). The HPI system does not entrust the user data in complete form to a single provider but fragments, encrypts and distributes it evenly to different suitable storage services, based on the user’s requirements. In this way, the availability, reliability and security of data in public clouds can be increased. The process recalls the principle in which several physical disks are connected to a logical drive in the hardware to achieve higher data transfer rates and reduced rates of failure (RAID Technology, Redundant Array of Independent Disks).
