PriCloud is a research project supported by Baden-Württemberg Stiftung. The goal of this project is to design and evaluate a distributed file storage service that protects the privacy of their clients and founds a base for productive deployment.

Given that secret services obviously can demand the provider to give access to all available data and resources, we need a cloud-storage service that prevents providers from knowing who stores which data. In the best case the provider does not even know what operations are made on the data on access and by whom. However, business models require that there is still a way of providing revenue stream from the customer to the service provider. With this project, we propose to resolve this seemingly unsolvable contradiction.

Our design incorporates privacy and security from the beginning and is based on the latest developments in privacy enhancing technologies, following a security and privacy by design philosophy. As privacy protection often comes with overhead that contradicts scalability we do not only address the security of our system but also investigate the tradeoffs between the two and develop mechanisms to lessen this problem.

Inspired by Filecoin, we integrate a mechanism for anonymous payment into the storage service, incentivizing participation in our distributed cloud storage network and thus building the base for commercial businesses to participate as file storage providers.