Section: Research Program

Privacy

In our world of ubiquitous technologies, each individual constantly leaves digital traces, related to his activities and interests, which can be linked to his identity. The protection of privacy is one of the greatest challenges that lie ahead and also an important condition for the development of the Information Society. Moreover, due to legality and confidentiality concerns, issues linked to privacy emerge naturally for applications working on sensitive data, such as medical records of patients or proprietary datasets of companies. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) are generally designed to respect both the principles of data minimization and data sovereignty. The data minimization principle states that only the information necessary to complete a particular application should be disclosed (and no more). This principle is a direct application of the legitimacy criteria defined by the European data protection directive (Article 7). This directive is currently being revised into a regulation that is going to strengthen the privacy rights of individuals and puts forward the concept of “privacy-by-design”, which integrates the privacy aspects into the conception phase of a service or technology. The data sovereignty principle states that data related to an individual belong to him and that he should stay in control of how this data is used and for which purpose. This principle can be seen as an extension of many national legislations on medical data that consider that a patient record belongs to the patient, and not to the doctors that create or update it, nor to the hospital that stores it. A fundamental hindrance to the achievement of sovereignty is that the trust assumptions given to external entities are often too optimistic, and thus they are many realistic situations in which they might betrayed.

In the CIDRE project, we investigate PETs operating at three different levels (node, set of nodes or open distributed system) and that are generally based on a mix of different foundations such as cryptographic techniques, security policies and access control mechanisms just to name a few. Examples of domains in which privacy and utility aspects collide and that are studied within the context of CIDRE include: identity management, location-based services, social networks, distributed systems and data mining. Here are some concrete examples of our research goals in the privacy field:

• At the node level, we design privacy-preserving identification scheme, automated reasoning on privacy policies and policy-based adaptive PETs;

• At the set of nodes level, we augment distributed algorithms with privacy properties such as anonymity, unlinkability and unobservability;

• At the open distributed system level, we target both privacy concerns linked to location disclosure (which typically occur in location-based services) and to the distribution of social networking and data sharing applications. In the former case, we adopt a sanitization approach while in the latter one we consider privacy policies at user level, and their enforcement by all the intervening actors (e.g, at the level of the social network providers, of intermediate servers or of individual peers, depending on the distribution level of the applicative architecture). We design novel algorithms for the resolution of privacy policy conflicts between autonomous entities, taking new concepts into consideration, such as the notion of equity in the context of access control decisions.