PriCloud is a research project at the Institute of Distributed Systems funded by Baden-Württemberg Stiftung. Its goal is a distributed storage service that preserves its clients' privacy. Especially, a storage provider does neither know who stores some data nor who is accessing it. PriCloud also supports corresponding business models. This means that the payment flow has to be protected as well. A crypto-currency combined with privacy-enhancing technologies  (PETs) takes care of it. In a corresponding block chain not only payment transactions are stored but also contracts belonging to storage and retrieval. The latter confirm the duty of users to pay. 

With a series of videos, we demonstrate the working processes within our PriCloud architecture. They further show our protype that computes the necessary cryptographic operations:

Contract Lifecycle
This video shows a storage contract and its lifecycle anchored in the block chain. It further shows how the provider is forced to actually store the file.

Storing a File
Here we show, how a file is prepared for storage at a provider.

Retrieving a File
This video shows what happens on access to a stored file including the corresponding payment of a fee.

Mining in PriCloud
Various transactions are integrated into the PriCloud block chain by so called miners. This video shows the corresponding process.

Anonymous Transactions
This video shows how payment transactions but also the other transactions needed for storage and retrieval are anonymised in order to protect the privacy of the corresponding actors.