Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Cozy Cloud bilateral contract (Dec 2014 - Nov. 2015)

Partners: Cozy Cloud, Inria-SMIS

SMIS funding: 50k€.

Many personal data end up today on servers where they can be scrutinized by companies and governmental agencies. To face this situation, the most emblematic initiative is the Personal Cloud paradigm. Roughly speaking, the Personal Cloud is an architecture which gives users the ability to store their complete digital environment, synchronize it among various devices and share it with other users and applications under their control. It reflects the expectation of the individuals for the emergence of privacy-by-design next-generation storage and computing services. Cozy Cloud is a French startup providing such a personal Cloud platform. The Cozy product is a software stack that anyone can deploy to run his personal server in order to host his personal data and web services. Cozy defines itself as the “Android of personal servers”. While centralizing all personal data in the holder's hand is a natural way to reestablish his control on his privacy, this represents an unprecedented threat in case of attacks by an intruder, especially for individuals who are not security experts. The objective of this bilateral contract is typically to address this issue by integrating the PlugDB solution into the Cozy stack. Roughly speaking, the Cozy data system will be modified in such a way to store only encrypted files and each file access will be intercepted and routed to PlugDB. PlugDB will act as a doorkeeper for the whole individual dataspace by managing the files' metadata, the access control rules defined on these metadata, the decryption keys and the user/application authentication.