Section: Overall Objectives

Highlights of the Year

The project Mobilitics has made significant advances in the context the Inria-CNIL convention in 2013. Major improvements have been made in the software, which include new capabilities and improved analysis (even for encrypted streams) for the two major systems that are iOS 6.2 and Android 4.1. A first phase of experiments for iOS took place in early 2013 with volunteers from the CNIL. It resulted in a press conference (April 2013) and a large media exposure. A second phase of experiments will take place in 2014 for Android. More targeted work on the our side also led to advances in understanding the ecosystem of mobile applications and the flows of personal information.

We have published at CODASPY 2013 [33] a new formal framework for the analysis of architectural choices. The privacy by design approach has already been put into practice in different application areas. We believe that the next challenge today is to go beyond individual cases and to provide methodologies to explore the design space in a systematic way. As a first step in this direction, we focus on the data minimization principle and consider different options using decentralized architectures in which actors do not necessarily trust each other. We propose a framework to express the parameters to be taken into account (the service to be performed, the actors involved, their respective requirements, etc.) and an inference system to derive properties such as the possibility for an actor to detect potential errors (or frauds) in the computation of a variable. This inference system can be used in the design phase to check if an architecture meets the requirements of the parties or to point out conflicting requirements.