I would like to hear advice from the more experienced developers. The project is
ID: 647215 • Letter: I
Question
I would like to hear advice from the more experienced developers. The project is now in the design stage. It's mobile application and a simple web application. Content is pictures, comments, personal correspondence.
Pictures can be quite personal. Need a very serious attitude to security.
The question is simple: where to store photos and how to secure it?
I think it's will be in the following way:
1. User make some photo. Via SSL the application sends photo to the server.
2. The server recieve photo, encrypt it and store somewhere.
Also, via app the user can see all own photos.
1. Request to server for photos.
2. Server decrypt stored photos and send via SSL to client.
I need some technical advices: where to save images, I know that database is quite slow for this case, which algorithms use for encrypt/decrypt, what about cache. It will be highload project and performance is very important.
Mobile application is planned on cross-platform framework like phoneGap, Titanium. On the server is .NET. But it is planned. I also consider full stack frameworks for javascript.
Explanation / Answer
I would recommend using Amazon S3.
They have a pretty decent API for .net and I use it for all my image storage.
You can set privacy on an image "bucket" which means without accessing with the user/password or token they will be perfectly secure.
Also of course, you get all the cloud rednundancy and location based hosted services, also would be great if you are going to be using it with mobile and web, as you won't be restricted by having your images stuck on a web server.