Section: Application Domains

Application Domains

Our work addresses varied application domains. Typically, data management techniques on chip are required each time data-driven applications have to be embedded in ultra-light computing devices. This situation occurs for example in healthcare applications where medical folders are embedded into smart tokens (e.g., smart cards, secured USB keys), in telephony applications where personal data (address book, agenda, etc.) is embedded into cellular phones, in sensor networks where sensors log row measurements and perform local computation on them, in smart-home applications where a collection of smart appliances gather information about the occupants to provide them a personalized service, and more generally in most applications related to ambient intelligence.

Safeguarding data confidentiality has become a primary concern for citizens, administrations and companies, broadening the application domains of our work on access control policies definition and enforcement. The threat on data confidentiality is manifold: external and internal attacks on the data at rest, on the data on transit, on the data hosted in untrusted environments (e.g., Database Service Providers, Web-hosting companies) and subject to illegal usage, insidious gathering of personal data in an ambient intelligence surrounding. Hence, new access control models and security mechanisms are required to accurately declare and safely control who is granted access to which data and for which purpose.

While the application domain mentioned above is rather large, two applications are today more specifically targeted by the SMIS team. The first one deals with privacy preservation in EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems and PCEHR (Personally Controlled EHR). We are developing technologies tackling this issue and experiment them in the field. The second application area deals with privacy preservation in the context of personal Cloud, that is personal data hosted in dedicated servers staying under the holder's control (e.g., in a personal internet box or in a home automation box).