Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

European Initiatives

Collaborations in European Programs, except FP7

• Program: EIT KICs

• Project acronym: EIT ICT Labs

• Project title: action line $«$ Security, Privacy and Trust in the Information Society $»$

• Duration: 2012-

• Coordinator: Sébastien Gambs (until September 2012 and since then Guido Bertoni, STMictoelectronics)

• Abstract: Information Technologies have invaded many aspects of people's daily lives, creating new possibilities but also raising concerns in term of privacy and trust. Protecting the privacy of individuals is one of the main challenges of the Information Society but it is difficult to achieve as individuals constantly leave digital traces of their lives, often without even being aware of this. If an unauthorized entity gathers these digital traces, he (or she) can use them for malicious purposes ranging from targeted spam to profiling, and even identity theft. From the technology viewpoint, a number of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and Privacy Aware Architectures have been proposed. So far, these technologies have not stimulated a strong public interest and are not widely used yet. However, the European Commission is putting forward the “privacy by design” principle, which integrates the privacy issues in the design phase of a system or application.

  Security and trust can be seen as complementary requirements to privacy. Large scale adoption of digital devices, like in eHealth and smart cities, requires trustworthy products and communication. These requirements are not (always) completely understood and off-the-shelf solutions could not fulfill the security, trust and privacy needs. There is a large gap between what is applied, usability requirements and the right level of security. This gap represents a strategic opportunity where European players have a recognized know-how and where leadership should be leveraged and nurtured.

  While the action line was originally intended to focus on privacy (created by a joint effort from Sébastien Gambs, Daniel Le Métayer and Claude Castelluccia from Inria Rhône-Alpes), its scope was recently extended to include security and trust thus being renamed as “Security, Privacy and Trust in the Information Society”. In 2012, a “location privacy” activity leaded by Sébastien Gambs was created that involves CIDRE and other partners (namely KTH, Alcatel-Lucent, University of Trento, Inria Rhône-Alpes, Nokia) coming from 3 different nodes of EIT ICT labs. An engineer funded by the project (Izabela Moise) is currently working on the development of a distributed version of GEPETO based on the MapReduce paradigm and the Hadoop framework, in order to make it able to deal with datasets composed of millions of mobility traces. In 2013, this activity will be extended to also address the issues of privacy and security for location-based services, thus being renamed “Security and privacy for location-based services”.

Collaborations with Major European Organizations

• Quaero

  CIDRE is involved in the Quaero project. Quaero is a program promoting research and industrial innovation on technologies for automatic analysis and classification of multimedia and multilingual documents. The partners collaborate on research and the realisation of advanced demonstrators and prototypes of innovating applications and services for access and usage of multimedia information, such as spoken language, images, video and music. The Quaero consortium (composed of French and German public and private research organisations) is coordinated by Technicolor.

  Our activity focuses on a task (leaded by Amedeo Napoli, équipe Inria Orpailleur) of the Quaero project whose aim is to study the implications in terms of privacy for a user to participate in personalized applications (such as video-on-demand) adapted to the user context, background and preferences as well as proposing solutions that can contribute to enhance this privacy. On one hand using personal data to tailor the content to the user needs may be important for improving the quality of service and its relevance but on the other hand this raises serious privacy issues regarding how this data will be collected, used and disseminated. The main purpose of the solutions developed in this task is to enable an individual to access personalized content/service in a privacy-preserving manner and without having to disclose any unnecessary personal information. From November 2011 until November 2012, Julien Lolive has worked on the project as an engineer. Izabela Moise has also joined the Quaero project since October 2012.