Section: New Software and Platforms

Introduction

In our research domain, developing software prototypes is mandatory to validate research solutions and is an important vector for publications, demonstrations at conferences as well as for cooperations with industry. Our software strategy is also driven by our ambition to see our research results produce a real societal impact. To reach this goal, we integrate our prototypes in experiments in the field - notably in the healthcare domain and with scientists of other disciplines - and we recently set up educational platforms to raise students awareness of privacy protection problems and embedded programming.

This prototyping task is however difficult because it requires specialized hardware platforms, themselves sometimes at an early stage of development. For a decade, we have developed successive prototypes relying on different hardware platforms provided by Schlumberger then Gemalto, e.g., PicoDBMS a full-fledged DBMS embedded in a smart card [37] [26] , Chip-Secured Data Access (C-SDA) a tamper-resistant mediator between a client and an untrusted server hosting encrypted data [32] , Chip-Secured XML Access (C-SXA) an XML-based access rights controller, recipient of the e-gate open 2004 Silver Award and SIMagine 2005 Gold award [33] . Today, most of our software development efforts are organized around a unified platform named PlugDB and we are designing our own hardware platforms, that are produced by electronic SMEs. This opens up new research and experiment opportunities and we are engaged in an open-source/open hardware initiative to disseminate our results at a larger scale, both for scientific, educational and business purposes.

The next subsections detail the two prototypes we are focusing on today.