Privacy-Preserving Photo Sharing App

Abstract

How many times have you gone to a wedding and then wanted an easy way to synchronize all the pictures taken at the wedding with your relatives? Similarly, how many times have you gone on a trip with your friends but then had trouble gaining access to your friends’ pictures of the trip? PicShare is an Android app which solves this problem. PicShare transparently shares photo albums between a group of sharing participants and automatically uploads photos to the albums shared between those participants. PicShare uses a reliable, fault-tolerant mechanism to synchronize albums, providing an identical replica of the album to all the participants sharing the album. It also provides the option of creating encrypted albums in which photos are transferred and stored in a privacy-preserving encrypted format to prevent anyone else from being able to see the photos. For high performance and scalability, PicShare uses a Google Cloud backend including App Engine, Google Storage and Google Push Notifications. We have tested PicShare in a variety of network conditions and found that it works reliably and efficiently in all of these settings.