# A Usable Encryption Solution for File-Based Geospatial Data within a Database File System
## 1 Introduction
Cryptography is vital to prevent access to sensitive geospatial data within an enterprise in case of security breaches, ransomware attacks, and unauthorized access [23]. This protection is essential for complying with the recent legal and ethical regulations of different jurisdictions [24]. Many encryption solutions have been proposed for spatial data stored in traditional file systems and database management systems [25]. However, building a cryptographic solution is not about implementing encryption alone, as the associated challenges need to be addressed, namely, concurrency, key management, and ensuring solution usability through various GIS applications and protocol services. According to the literature, efforts to integrate security with usability often focus on enhancing the openness of security processes rather than making the system itself more useful [26]. _Usability_ and _security_ go together [27, 28]. Most users tend to skip security applications or fail to incorporate security into their work due to encryption performance or complicated solutions that prevent them from working effectively in a collaborative environment [29]. Essentially, existing solutions for spatial file security cannot be integrated without affecting _collaboration_ and cannot be _integrated_ with the various GIS applications and protocol services. The root of these problems lies in security software internals: it is almost impossible to find a solution that deals with security issues in a transparent way, such that the GIS user needs only to know that the system has been secured; this is clearly a bad solution. A good GIS cryptographic solution's design must go further than the implementation of new ciphers and protocols into the realm of practical, _usable_ security. Considering these concerns, a localised spatial file storage infrastructure is needed to address traditional file systems' limitations by furnishing consolidated storage and management, including content management features, for files in various formats while protecting them at the storage layer from malicious insiders and external threats. Nevertheless, the key challenge is to ensure that any such solution is _usable_. Such a solution will enable access from a central repository, resulting in improved GIS collaboration and decision-making capacity and assisting with fulfilling data privacy laws and regulations. This paper proposes a DBFS as an alternative consolidated storage platform for spatial files. _Cryptography_ is applied for added protection, addressing several key challenges during the cryptographic design process, namely, the choice of encryption algorithm, providing for multiple users, concurrency, automation, and key management methods. Thereafter, a GIS security model is presented, and the developed solution is evaluated against various adversarial attacks. We include usability testing to demonstrate that the encryption-decryption solution accommodates the aforementioned intricacies. The test focuses on the implementation of the solution within contemporary enterprise GIS services using file shares and the QGIS desktop application and highlights the _security_, _concurrency_, and _seamless integration_ aspects. Another implementation demonstrates how the solution can be used to provide additional security for spatial files stored in a database-centric GIS Portal and geodatabases within a Web Atlas. The rest of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 presents related works in the area and the research objectives. Section 3 introduces the architecture of the encryption and decryption solution for spatial files, and Section 4 describes the automation of the solution. Section 5 presents the usability analysis and implementation of the encryption solution. This is followed by a discussion of the security and usability of the solution in Section 6. A discussion of the findings is included in Section 6, and the conclusion is in Section 7.