Clipperz: secure storage in the cloud

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 09:19:47 +0100

Seeing a post about about it on LifeHacker reminded me I haven't mentioned the launch of Clipperz by Marco Barulli and Giulio Cesare. I was introduced to them by Paolo while I was working for PAOGA because he thought we might be working on two sides of the same problem, and so we were.

PAOGA was seeking to become the individuals' secure repository for their information in such a way that it would be easy to share subsets of their information with trusted friends and partners (for example sharing information about your home and contents with a potential insurer). Our model was centralized with key storage in the cloud (we anticipated that trusted key serving would become a business opportunity). We did have some view that, ultimately, some kind of client model might be necessary where encryption and decryption happened on a users own computer - but there were signficant technical challenges that, as a startup, we didn't feel we could tackle.

Marco and Giulio were not so daunted and through incredible effort have delivered such a solution in the form of Clipperz. They took the novel approach of building their encryption engine in Javascript and delivering it to the user via the browser. Information stored using Clipperz is encrypted in the cloud and only in clear on your computer, where it is decrypted by your key within the browser session. Clipperz themselves cannot decrypt the information they store on your behalf because they don't have the key, only you do. Quite an achievement.

However, as we learned at PAOGA, secure storage alone can be a tough consumer sell. The real opportunities come from enabling secure use of information. Within the family is as good a place to start as any: an example would be the ability to securely store information you wanted to share with your spouse in the event of death or a serious accident (like where the deeds to the house are kept, or the number of your secret swiss bank account).

Marco is coming along to the Open Coffee event on April the 19th. If you're interested in secure management of personal information it would be a good chance to come along and meet him and see Clipperz demo'd.

Curiouser and Curiouser! on clipperz

Clipperz: secure storage in the cloud