Section: New Results

Trusted Cell Data Management

Participants : Nicolas Anciaux, Philippe Bonnet, Luc Bouganim, Benjamin Nguyen, Philippe Pucheral, Iulian Sandu Popa.

With the convergence of mobile communications, sensors and online social networks technologies, we are witnessing an exponential increase in the creation and consumption of personal data. Such data is volunteered by users, automatically captured by sensors or inferred from existing data. Today, there is a wide consensus that individuals should have increased control on how their personal data is collected, managed and shared. Yet there is no appropriate technical solution to implement such personal data services: centralized solutions sacrifice security for innovative applications, while decentralized solutions sacrifice innovative applications for security. In this work, we argue that the advent of secure hardware in all personal IT devices, at the edges of the Internet, could trigger a sea change. We propose the vision of trusted cells: personal data servers running on secure smart phones, set-top boxes, secure portable tokens or smart cards to form a global, decentralized data platform that provides security yet enables innovative applications. We motivate our approach, describe the trusted cells architecture and define a range of challenges for future research in a paper published at CIDR'13 (Int. Conf on Innovative Data Systems Research) [17] .