Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Grants with Industry

Nokia (ex Alcatel-Lucent)

Within the framework of the joint lab Inria-ALU, Grace and Alcatel-Lucent collaborate on the topic of Private Information Retrieval: that is, enabling a user to retrieve data from a remote database while revealing neither the query nor the retrieved data. (This is not the same as data confidentiality, which refers to the need for users to ensure secrecy of their data; this is classically obtained through encryption, which prevents access to data in the clear.)

A typical application would be a centralized database of medical records, which can be accessed by doctors, nurses, and so on. A desirable privacy goal would be that the central system does not know which patient is queried for when a query is made, and this goal is precisely achieved by a Private Information Retrieval protocol. Note also that in this scenario the database is not encrypted, since many users are allowed to access it.

We are exploring applications of Locally Decodable Codes to Private Information Retrieval in the multi-cloud (multi-host) setting, to ensure both secure, reliable storage, and privacy of database queries.

N. Coxon made the first implementation of these codes, who are indeed very practical. On a laptop, we can encode an ADN of a drosophilia in two seconds, and a ${10}^9$ bit data base in 30 seconds. We have a few real-life scenario in mind (DNA, geolocalisation, streaming), and we will check how realistic they are.

Safran Identity and Security (ex-Morpho)

A contract has been signed in November 2016 between Safran Identity and Security and École polytechnique, for one year post-doc position. A candidate has been found, and will arrive early 2017 (January).

The topic is the research is to use bitcoin's blockchain to issue and manipulate certification of identities, which is very close to the (trendy) topic of diplomation with blockchains.

Safran had a preliminary construction for doing that, and a preliminary version has been submitted to the IEEE Security and Privacy on the Blockchain Workshop.