Section: New Results

Personal Cloud

Participants : Nicolas Anciaux [correspondent] , Luc Bouganim, Athanasia Katsouraki, Benjamin Nguyen, Philippe Pucheral, Iulian Sandu Popa, Paul Tran Van.

We are witnessing an exponential increase in the acquisition of personal data about the individuals or produced by them. Today, this information is managed using Web applications, centralizing this data in cloud data servers, under the control of few Web majors [5] . However, it has now become clear that (1) centralizing millions of personal records exposes the data to very sophisticated attacks, linked to a very high potential benefit in case of success (millions of records being revealed), and (2) delegating the management of personal records without any tangible guarantee for the individuals leads to privacy violations, the data being potentially made accessible to other organizations (e.g., governments, commercial partners) and being subject to lucrative secondary usages (not advertised to the individuals). To face this situation, many recent initiatives push towards the emergence of the Personal Cloud paradigm. A personal cloud can be viewed as a personal server, owned by a given individual, which gives to its owner the ability to store her complete digital environment, synchronize it among various devices and share it with other individuals and applications under control. Many projects and startups currently investigate this solution, like OpenPDS, CozyCloud, OwnCloud, etc. In the SMIS team, we claim the need of a Secure Personal Cloud, and promote the introduction of a secure (tamper resistant) data engine in the architecture [11] . On this basis, we investigate new data sharing and dissemination models, where usage and access control rules endorsed by the individuals could be enforced. In 2014, we have presented this vision at EDBT’14 [18] . Several underlying research problems and perspectives have been presented in [11] . We have started a cooperation with the startup CozyCloud at the end of 2014. A contract was signed at the end of 2014 to integrate PlugDB in a CozyCloud instance and the PhD of Paul Tran Van (CIFRE SMIS-CozyCloud) has just started to explore new data sharing techniques which could be enforced in the secure personal cloud model. Athanasia Katsouraki is working on privacy issues and on adoption of the secure data engine in cooperation with the economists (CERDI) in the context of the Digital Society Institute (DSI).