Section: New Results

Trusted Cells

Participants : Nicolas Anciaux, Philippe Bonnet, Luc Bouganim, Benjamin Nguyen, Pilippe Pucheral [correspondent] , 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). This work was based on a thorough analysis of existing and potential threats on personal data, which led to a tutorial on data privacy [18] , [30] .

In parallel, we revisited the Trusted Cells vision to the context of Least Developed Countries (LDCs). The main barrier to the development of IT services in these regions is not only the lack of communication facilities, but also the lack of consistent information systems, security procedures, economic and legal support. We propose, Folk-enabled Information System (Folk-IS), a new paradigm based on a fully decentralized and participatory approach, where each individual implements a small subset of a complete information system without the need for infrastructure. As trusted cells, Folk-IS builds upon the emergence of highly secure, portable, low-cost storage and computing devices, called hereafter Smart Tokens. Here, however, the focus is on the low cost of ownership, deployment and maintenance, and on the absence of a networked infrastructure. With Folk-IS, and thanks to smart tokens, people will transparently and opportunistically perform data management and networking tasks as they physically move, so that IT services are truly delivered by the crowd [17] .