Questions&Answers
The CSP Innovation Forum 2015 was organised by the European Commission, DG CNECT (Unit H4 Trust & Security) and the CSP Forum along 28th and 29th of April.
https://www.cspforum.eu/2015/
Over 40 top tech, EU funded, trust and security projects, including TREDISEC (Trust-aware, Reliable and Distributed Information Security in the Cloud), with focused research activities in hot topical areas such as mobile devices technologies and tools, cloud security, criptography and trustworthy network and services infrastructures are being showcased live at a major EU Innovation forum this week, were over 500 cyber security and privacy experts, project leaders, industry, academics and visionaries are also pooling their knowledge to create a safer and more secure ICT environment.
TREDISEC will develop new systems and techniques which make the cloud a secure and efficient haven to store and process data. The objective is to step away from a myriad of disconneted security protocols or cryptographic algorithms, and to converge on a single framework where all objectives are met.
The project has received funding from the European Commission under the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) theme of the Horizon 2020 framework programme (H2020-ICT-2014-1). The project started in April 2015, coordinated by Atos with partners NEC Europe (United Kingdom), IBM Research (Switzerland), Eurecom (France), Arsys (Spain), GRNET (Greece), SAP (Germany) and Morpho (France). More information about the project is available at www.tredisec.eu.
For information, please contact the project coordinator, Ms. Beatriz Gallego-Nicasio at beatriz.gallego-nicasio@atos.net.
- Press release published in GPSNews.es, online magazine specialized in Communication and PR.
- Press release published in CIO.es, website specialized in IT trends.
- Press release published in strategicpartner.es, IT CIO.es and techWEEK.es, online channels belonging to ITMedia Network, communication platform addressed to IT professionals.
- Press release published in elcandelerotecnologico.com, website specialized in IT news.
- Press release published in Datacenter Dynamics, information provider addressed to professionals of data centres sector.
- Press release published in ITSeguridad.es, specialized website in CyberSecurity.
The Cloud World Forum event has been taken place at the Olympia Grand in London between 24-25 June and has this year grown its audience and floor plan by 30%.
Cloud World Forum is EMEA’s largest Cloud expo. Thousands of delegates come from more than 70 countries around the world to meet the industry’s leading solution providers. Now celebrating its seventh year, the show gathers the pivotal payers of the Cloud revolution and features 16 content theatres. More than 300 speakers from multinationals, SMEs, public sector organisations, online players, regulators, telcos and analysts are set to take the floor in engaging, thought-provoking keynotes, hands-on labs, brainstorming sessions and live demos over two days.
TREDISEC has been present in this event by courtesy of CSP forum, that has offered its space to exhibit flyers of the project.
The TREDISEC consortium set the first project internal workshop for the definition of the Use Cases, in the context of WP2 Requirements and Architecture for a Secure, Trusted and Efficient Cloud.
The objective of this workshop was to have a clearer description of the context scenarios, their technical requirements and define clearly the set of use cases that will be used for evaluation of the TREDISEC technical developments.
This workshop lasted a 1 full day meeting, hosted by GRNET in their offices in Athens: SAP, ATOS, ARSYS, EURECOM, IBM, MORPHO, NEC y GRNET attended the meeting.
Learn more about the TREDISEC Use Cases at http://www.tredisec.eu/content/use-cases
From 28th to 30th of September 2015, it will be held the 1st Workshop on Security and Privacy in the Cloud in Florence, Italy, in conjunction with the IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS 2015).
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners who are interested in discussing the security, privacy, and data protection issues emerging in cloud scenarios, and possible solutions to them.
The workshop seeks submissions from academia, industry, and government presenting novel research, as well as experimental studies, on all theoretical and practical aspects of security, privacy, and data protection in cloud scenarios.
Several members of the TREDISEC consortium will attend to this workshop as Program Chair, (Elli Androulaki, IBM Research), and as part of the Program Committee (Ghassan Karame, NEC Labs; Florian Kerschbaum, SAP and Melek Önen, EURECOM).
TREDISEC is a leading project in research, development and innovation in security in the cloud, and has involved some of the leading european experts in this field. NEC Labs, SAP, and EURECOM are recognized researchers, well-positioned in the current state-of-the-art advances that has brought the boost of cloud environment for IT sector.
For more information: http://www.zurich.ibm.com/spc2015/
Arsys, partner belonging to the TREDISEC project consortium, has published today in its blog a post explaining the main features of the project, and how Arsys is going to collaborate on it.
http://www.arsys.info/seguridad/arsys-se-incorpora-al-proyecto-europeo-t...
The 6th International Conference on E-Democracy (e-Democracy 2015, http://www.edemocracy2015.eu), will take place in Athens, Greece, 10-11 December 2015, with a special session on research conducted within European R&D projects related to e-Democracy and e-Participation, e-Government, Security, Privacy and Trust, e-Crime, e-Fraud and Digital Forensics.
In this special session, each participating project can present its main research challenges&results in a short presentation and with a poster which will be exhibited in or near the conference room.
Participating projects will also be invited to submit an extended abstract of 2 pages, that will be published in e-Democracy 2015 conference proceedings.
The paper/extended abstract entitled "TREDISEC: Trust-aware reliable and distributed information security in the cloud" has been accepted for presentation at the conference and for inclusion in the proceedings, subject to registration to the conference.
The paper is a joint work of the TREDISEC consortium, led by Melek Önen (Eurecom).
More information in http://www.edemocracy2015.eu/
Atos has published "enabling trusted European cloud", a document that aims to clarify those fundamental issues that affects cloud developments in Europe, and reassure potential cloud customer that there are ways of steering through them.
It proposes a roadmap in which all parties, including customers, need to be involved to achieve a vibrant and successful cloud environment that is fit for the European purpose.
Atos throurh ARI (Atos Research&Innovation) has run a number of projects that contribute to the concept of Trusted European Cloud. They have run many projects, many supported by funding from the EC, that span security, privacy and cloud.
TREDISEC appears as one of these projects, mentioned in page 34. TREDISEC is focused on research about securing data access in multi-tenant storage systems.
Atos has published "enabling trusted European cloud", a document that aims to clarify those fundamental issues that affects cloud developments in Europe, and reassure potential cloud customer that there are ways of steering through them.
It proposes a roadmap in which all parties, including customers, need to be involved to achieve a vibrant and successful cloud environment that is fit for the European purpose.
Atos throurh ARI (Atos Research&Innovation) has run a number of projects that contribute to the concept of Trusted European Cloud. They have run many projects, many supported by funding from the EC, that span security, privacy and cloud.
TREDISEC appears as one of these projects, mentioned in page 34. TREDISEC is focused on research about securing data access in multi-tenant storage systems.
CSP Forum has published its newsletter of July 2015.
TREDISEC is mentioned among the new projects related to cibersecurity that has started along last quarter.
Atos Spain will chair a networking session in the event of reference ICT 2015, organized by European Commsion to promote the knowledge of technological research financed with european funds. the selected projects are TREDISEC; WITDOM and PRISMACLOUD, will be discussed the following topic : "Key challenges in end-to-end privacy/security in untrusted environments".
Currently it´s available the networking session schedule with all details int the website of the event:
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/events/cf/ict2015/item-display.cfm?i...
There will be three talks given by three speakers, one for every project, that will deal with a specific key challenge related to the main topic.
Ghassan Karame, (NEC laboratories), well-known expert on the subject of the debate will attend from TREDISEC and give the talk titled: “Data protection versus storage efficiency and multi-tenancy”
In Ghassan´s words, the talk approach would be: “Implementing existing end-to-end security solutions unfortunately cancels out the advantages of the cloud technology such as cost effective storage. We will talk about the challenges resulting from the combination of security, functional and non- functional requirements such as storage efficiency and multi-tenancy.”
Atos takes part in TREDISEC, the UE project to improve security in the cloud.
The H2020 projects WITDOM (www.witdom.eu), TREDISEC (www.tredisec.eu) and PRISMACLOUD (www.prismacloud.eu), addressing to the H2020-ICT-2014-1 call, organize a joint networking session at the ICT 2015 – Innovate, Connect, Transform event, held on October 22nd 2015 at 14:50CET in Room 8 of Centro de Congressos de Lisboa, Lisbon (Portugal). The joint networking session will discuss challenges to both security and end-users´ privacy when outsourcing data to untrusted environments, such as privacy protection, integrity, data storage efficiency or multi-tenancy.
The networking session organized by WITDOM, TREDISEC and PRISMACLOUD is also supported by the project WISER (www.cyberwiser.eu) from the call H2020-DS-2014-1, acting as conductor of the session.
Mr. Nick Ferguson from Trust-IT Services and coordinator of the EC-funded CloudWATCH2 project, will set the stage with a presentation focussing on the key challenges related to the cloud. These challenges will be later presented by recognized researchers in the field to discuss where the trends are moving. Finally, a questions and answers slot is offered to interact with the audience about the proposed topics.
Presentation 1: “Cloud challenges to high-demanding privacy scenarios.” Abstract: “Distributed environments, in particular cloud ones, are generally perceived as being untrusted for storing sensitive personal data. Unless specific data protection measures are implemented, Cloud Providers and malicious parties could gain access to such data and make an unlawful use of them, beyond the specific context of explicitly authorized purposes. In case of scenarios with high-demanding privacy needs (such as eHealth or financial data), moving operations to the cloud requires the provisioning of strict guarantees to all involved parties, in full compliance with the law and according to state-of-the-art technology and best privacy-by-design and cloud security practices. In this talk some of these privacy challenges will be presented, as well as some approaches to overcome them.”
Speaker: Nicolas Notario McDonnell (Atos). Project WITDOM.
Presentation 2: “Verifiability and Authenticity of Data and Beyond” Abstract: “In this talk we discuss aspects related to reliably checking that third party infrastructure (i.e., the cloud) behaves as expected when storing and processing data. The focus is on cryptographic measures that ensure and sometimes even enforce honest behaviour and at least allow cryptographically holding the cloud accountable when it deviates from the expected behaviour.”
Speaker: Mr. Henrich C. Pöhls (Passau University). Project PRISMACLOUD.
Presentation 3: “Data protection versus storage efficiency and multi-tenancy” Abstract: “Implementing existing end-to-end security solutions unfortunately may reduce the advantages of the cloud technology such as cost effective storage. We will talk about the challenges resulting from the combination of security, functional and non- functional requirements such as storage efficiency and multi-tenancy.”
Speaker: Ghassan Karame (NEC). Project TREDISEC.
The first project General Assembly will take place at Eurecom's premises in Sophia-Antipolis (France), on the 19th and 20th of November. This face-to-face meeting will gather Tredisec partners to report on the progress of the different work-packages, discuss upcoming tasks and deliverables, and revisit the overall management, innovation and communication strategy of the project.
Abstract
Cloud storage providers such as Dropbox and Google drive heavily rely on data deduplication to save storage costs by only storing one copy of each uploaded file. Although recent studies report that whole file deduplication can achieve up to 50% storage reduction, users do not directly benefit from these savings—as there is no transparent relation between effective storage costs and the prices offered to the users.
In this paper, we propose a novel storage solution, ClearBox, which allows a storage service provider to transparently attest to its customers the deduplication patterns of the (encrypted) data that it is storing. By doing so, ClearBox enables cloud users to verify the effective storage space that their data is occupying in the cloud, and consequently to check whether they qualify for benefits such as price reductions, etc. ClearBox is secure against malicious users and a rational storage provider, and ensures that files can only be accessed by their legitimate owners. We evaluate a prototype implementation of ClearBox using both Amazon S3 and Dropbox as back-end cloud storage. Our findings show that our solution works with the APIs provided by existing service providers without any modifications and achieves comparable performance to existing solutions.
The paper is related to the work conducted by ETH in work package 4.
Abstract
Cloud platforms that use logical partitions to allocate dedicated resources to VMs can benefit from small and therefore secure hypervisors. Many-core platforms, with their abundant resources, are an attractive basis to create and deploy logical partitions on a large scale. However, many-core platforms are designed for efficient cross-core data sharing rather than isolation, which is a key requirement for logical partitions. Typically, logical partitions leverage hardware virtualization extensions that require complex CPU core enhancements. These extensions are not optimal for many-core platforms, where it is preferable to keep the cores as simple as possible.
In this paper, we show that a simple address-space isolation mechanism, that can be implemented in the Network-on-Chip of the many-core processor, is sufficient to enable logical partitions. We implement the proposed change for the Intel Single-Chip Cloud Computer (SCC). We also design a cloud architecture that relies on a small and disengaged hypervisor for the security-enhanced Intel SCC. Our prototype hypervisor is 3.4K LOC which is comparable to the smallest hypervisors available today. Furthermore, virtual machines execute bare-metal avoiding runtime interaction with the hypervisor and virtualization overhead.
Publication related to WP4.
Abstract
With the continuous increase of cloud storage adopters, data deduplication has become a necessity for cloud providers. By storing a unique copy of duplicate data, cloud providers greatly reduce their storage and data transfer costs. Unfortunately, deduplication introduces a number of new security challenges. We propose PerfectDedup, a novel scheme for secure data deduplication, which takes into account the popularity of the data segments and leverages the properties of Perfect Hashing in order to assure block-level deduplication and data condentiality at the same time. We show that the client-side overhead is minimal and the main computational load is outsourced to the cloud storage provider.
Publication related to WP3
Abstract
Spurred by the advent of cloud computing, the domain of verifiable computations has known significant progress in recent years. Verifiable computation techniques enable a client to safely outsource its computations to a remote server. This server performs the calculations and generates a proof asserting their correctness. The client thereafter simply checks the proof to convince itself of the correctness of the output. In this paper, we study how recent advances in cryptographic techniques in this very domain can be applied to biometric verification.
ICT 2015 networking session: Privacy/security in untrusted environments
The H2020 projects WITDOM, TREDISEC and PRISMACLOUD organize a joint networking session at the ICT 2015 – Innovate, Connect, Transform event, held on October 22nd 2015 at 14:50 CET in Room 8 of Centro de Congressos de Lisboa, Lisbon (Portugal). The joint networking session will discuss challenges to both security and end-users’ privacy when outsourcing data to untrusted environments, such as privacy protection, integrity, data storage efficiency or multi-tenancy.
Atos organized a networking session in the ICT 2015, supported by H2020 projects: WITDOM, TREDISEC, and PRISMACLOUD.
ICT is one of the most relevant events organized by European Commission to promote projects financed by european funds, that research last technological advances beyond the state-of-the-art.
The session entitled "Key challenges in end-to-end privacy/security in untrusted environments" was chaired by Silvana Muscella, CEO & founder of Trust-IT, with a recognized career in ICT communication & business.
Next, Nicolas Notario, member of WITDOM project, Henrich Pohls (PRISMACLOUD project) and Ghassan Karame (TREDISEC project), took over the session, and each of them showed a specific challenge about cloud security.
The further discussion with the audience unveiled audience concerns. It was remarkable the animated discussions about informed consent, and the ethic conflicts derived from the legal loopholes associated to them.
No doubt that privacy and security in cloud will be fully a main topic of debate next years, due to the growth of cloud services, and resulting consequences in data protection.
For more details, here you have the presentations given by the speakers:
TREDISEC is a Research and Innovation Action co-funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme.
More details here.
TREDISEC aims at contributing to enhance the security and privacy of existing cloud technologies, while keeping efficiency and cost levels stable.
Currently, when we introduce an improvement in the security of cloud storage, it comes at the expense of higher costs, and lower efficiency results.
TREDISEC encompasses both functional and non-functional demands, and has the ambition to design mechanisms that satisfy security and functional requirements at comparable level.
The project is coordinated by Atos, an international firm leader in digital services, leading a consoritum of European representatives from industry and research institutes from different countries (NEC in UK, Eurecom in France, GRNET in Greece, Arsys in Spain, IBM in Switzerland, SAP SE in Germany and Morpho in France).
The different TREDISEC consortium partners contribute as providers of Cloud services, solutions and infrastructures, participating in the research and development of beyond the state-of-the-art technologies and solutions, in the field of secure and trust-worthy ICT.
TREDISEC has a budget of around 6,5 million €, out of that the European Commission funds around 4,4 million €. The budget is used mainly to cover personnel costs of the entities that take part in the project, to conduct research, develop new innovative technologies, and test them in realistic evaluation scenarios. But also, to manage the project, foster collaboration and regularly disseminate the achievements, and make a technology transfer assessment that turns into a realistic strategy for the exploitation of results, either individually or jointly, by the members of the consortium.
TREDISEC is a 3 years duration project (36 months). The project started on April 1st 2015 and is planned to finish by March 30th 2018.
Most existing solutions are not suitable for the market because they either provide security at the expense of the economy of scale and cost effectiveness of the cloud (e.g. data is encrypted before being outsourced, which prevents any computation to be performed in the cloud), or they meet the latter objectives at the expense of security (e.g., data deduplication and compression optimally use the resources of the cloud provider but require the customer to blindly trust its cloud provider).
The main aim of TREDISEC is to bridge this gap by developing tools and systems to address these shortcomings and to enhance the confidentiality and integrity of data outsourced to the cloud without affecting functionality, and storage efficiency.
From a practical standpoint, the ambition of this project is to develop systems and techniques that make the cloud a secure and efficient place to store data. We plan to step away from a myriad of disconnected security protocols or cryptographic algorithms, and to converge instead on a (possibly standardized) single framework where all objectives are met to the highest extent possible.
The work plan is organised in 7 work packages, whose interdependencies and relations are depicted in the project structure section.
- MS1: Use cases and scenario context definition due at M6 (September 2015).
- MS2: Consolidated requirements and architectural models due at M12 (March 2016).
- MS3: Design of the security primitives and framework due at M20 (November 2016).
- MS4: Implementation of the security primitives and the framework due at M30 (September 2017).
- MS5: Deployment of the Use Cases Evaluation environment due at M33 (December 2017).
- MS6: Final evaluation of TREDISEC due at M36 (March 2018).
The European Commission states that businesses and consumers still do not feel confident enough to adopt cross-border cloud services for storing or processing data, because of concerns relating to security, compliance with fundamental rights and data protection more generally.
Improving security and privacy features contributes to increase the differentiating character, placing on the market services and solutions (new or improved) that are aligned with the european directives of security and privacy. On the other hand, offering services and solutions more secure, users can gain greater control over their data, increasing trust in IT technologies and services online.
Another priority objectives of the EU, is to protect our networks and critical infrastruture and respond effectively to cyber-threats, and have adopted both national and EU-level cybersecurity strategies and regulation.
Currently, cloud infrastructures services are increansingly the more extended option by most business of the EU, therefore protect them against cyber attacks is critical.
Clearly, the development of technologies that allow cloud infrastructures to be stronger and qualified against possible attacks, with a major ability to recover quicker and better after a cyber security incident, results in enhancing security and business preparedness.
Cloud Computing for EU is one of the main competitiveness drivers for all enterprises in EU, independently of its size and sector, therefore it has become one of the main priorities in the European Digital Agenda, and main player in numerous initiatives started up within the member countries.
The next 27th of November, Olof Sandstrom, operations manager of Arsys, will give a talk about Public Cloud Security, focusing on unveiling miths that often are linked to cloud security.
Since cloud solutions started to expand among industry, security has been one of the more common constraints to hinder cloud adoption.
Mr. Sandstrom will talk about cloud security since this point of view, and will present TREDISEC as an example of research in cloud security within state-of-the-art projects.
More details about Codemotion event: http://2015.codemotion.es/
Arsys, partner belonging to the TREDISEC project consortium, has published in its blog a post talking about CODEMOTION, one of the biggest events for developers, set in Madrid.
TREDISEC project will be presented in this event, introduced by Olof Sandstrom, Arsys Manager Operations, as an EC initiative that has as objective the development of procedures and technological solutions that combine security, efficiency, and technical functionalities, making easier cloud adoption among european enterprises.
Complete Arsys post here (text in spanish): http://www.arsys.info/eventos/codemotion-el-mayor-evento-sobre-programac...
Cybercamp 2015 is the meeting place for young talents, families, entrepreneurs and anyone interested in cybersecurity. It will be held in the BarclayCard Center of the Community of Madrid from 27 to 29 November.
Beatriz Gallego, Atos project leader, will give a talk in Cybercamp next Sunday, 29th November at 10:45 a.m. to explain how TREDISEC can provide security and efficiency in the cloud for public sector, cloud providers or enterprises, including SMEs.
On 19th - 20th November TREDISEC consortium got together in order to report on the project status and progress of the managerial/administrative, financial, technical and dissemination/communication activities carried out in the past 8 months.
Attendants presented the work conducted in the different work packages, advances and deliverables submitted.
Besides, next steps were decided according to roadmap designed for the project.
The meeting hosted in Sophia Antipolis by EURECOM.
Hellenic Data Protection Authority and a number of universities. It is intended, similarly to previous occasions, to provide a forum for presenting and debating the latest developments in the field, from a technical, political, and legal point of view.
The conference has included a special session on research conducted within European R&D projects related to e-Democracy and e-Participation, e-Government, Security, Privacy and Trust, e-Crime, e-Fraud and Digital Forensics.
Within this special session, Panos Louridas, from GRNET, one of the companies that takes part of the TREDISEC consortium, has presented TREDISEC project explaining its contribution for Security, Privacy and Trust fields.
The objective of TREDISEC is to develop novel, modular end-to-end security primitives that can be combined in a unified framework to cover the entire spectrum of cloud-relevant security, functional, and non-functional requirements.
TREDISEC plans to step away from a myriad of disconnected security protocols or cryptographic algorithms, and to converge on a single framework where all objectives are met. As result, it will deliver a number of practical security solutions for cloud storage and computations, which makes the cloud a secure and efficient haven for data storage.
More information in the presentation showed in the conference.
The book E-Democracy – Citizen Rights in the World of the New Computing Paradigms has recently been published in electronic and print format, in the Springer website.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on E-Democracy, E-Democracy 2015, held in Athens, Greece, in December 2015.
It contains13 revised full papers presented together with 8 extended abstracts that were selected from 33 submissions.
The papers are organized in topical sections on privacy in e-voting, e-polls and e-surveys; security and privacy in new computing paradigms; privacy in online social networks; e-government and e-participation; legal issues. The book also contains the extended abstracts describing progress within European research and development projects on security and privacy in the cloud; secure architectures and applications; enabling citizen-to-government communication.
TREDISEC was selected to be presented in the conference, after the approval of the extended abstract sent by the consortium project.
Panos Louridas, from GRNET, one of the companies that takes part of the TREDISEC consortium, was responsible of presenting TREDISEC at the conference, explaining its contribution for Security, Privacy and Trust fields.
TREDISEC extended abstract is contained in the book from page 193.
Article entitled "TREDISEC: Towards Realizing a Truly Secure and Trustworthy Cloud" has been published in issue no. 104 (corresponding to January 2016) of the magazine ERCIM News, in the section devoted to present Research and Innovation initiaves.
The article is a joint work of the project consortium and authored by Beatriz Gallego-Nicasio (ATOS), Melek Önen (EURC) and Ghassan Karame (NEC), and presents an overview of the project, its main research and innovation challenges and an outline of the validation approach that is going to be followed.
The issue is published online at http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en104 and can be also download as PDF or EPUB formats:
http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN104/EN104-web.pdf
http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN104/EN104.epub
Problem context
End-to-end security comes at odds with current functionality offered by the cloud. Existing state of the art solutions completely give up one requirement for the other. End-to-end security aims to endow the users with full control over their outsourced data, but cloud service providers may not be able to efficiently process clients' data, nor may they be able to take full advantage of cost-effective storage solutions which rely on existing deduplication and compression mechanisms.
Another important point that should not be overlooked when designing security mechanisms for cloud systems is their integration into a single framework. Typically, a security primitive is devised for a single use-case and/or a specific application. Although such a design approach may reduce the complexity of the solution, it may lead to situations where security primitives are incompatible to the point that they cannot be implemented using the same interface or the same framework.
Progress towards the objectives and advance beyond the state of the art
During this reporting period, the TREDISEC consortium partners have been focusing in designing novel end-to-end security solutions for scenarios with conflicting functional and security requirements, using as bases the representative scenarios and use-cases defined by the end-user partners. We first had to identify the functional requirements that are crucial to the cloud business and explore non-functional requirements such as storage efficiency and multi-tenancy. Next, we had to analyse the conflicts between these requirements and security needs in order to develop new solutions that address these shortcomings and enhance security. Moreover, state of the art mechanisms and solutions have been analysed thoroughly in technical work-packages (WP2, WP3, WP4 and WP5). In particular, some partners of the consortium have already achieved the following advances:
- devise new primitives to support data confidentiality and data deduplication, including the analysis of its compatibility with Proof of Ownership (PoW) mechanisms;
- actively analyse the state of the art with respect to searchable encryption, secure biometric computations, and possible parallel computation and migration mechanisms;
- describe mechanisms for an optimized storage of encrypted data based on the analysis of historical or anticipated SQL queries;
- conduct a thorough survey on the state of the art on verifiable storage, verifiable computation and verifiable ownership topics in order to identify the TREDISEC specific requirements have been conducted;
- proposed a new security model for outsourced proof of retrievability;
- propose a study on the possibility of applying verifiable computing techniques to biometric comparison;
- investigating approaches to vulnerability discovery and isolation in file systems that are used to provide storage for cloud services;
- proposed a novel mechanism which enables the emerging many-core processor architectures to provide secure isolation properties for cloud platforms and especially IaaS deployments.
The design of the TREDISEC framework which efficiently integrates the required security primitives, without incurring extra processing and storage cost at the cloud service providers or end-users, has been also a key activity during these last months. The ultimate goal of the TREDISEC framework is to facilitate the orchestration of different security primitives deployed into real cloud systems.
A first architectural model of the framework has been outlined, taking into account business, quality and operational requirements, since it should support a range of stakeholders (e.g. security administrators, developers, or cloud system engineers) and target cloud offerings.
By using the framework, security primitives can be tested in isolation or combined with others, in order to produce pre-packaged security solutions ready to be deployed, which are guaranteed of being free of incompatibilities, but also should permit cloud system engineers and security experts to select, according to their own system needs, the functional and non-functional (security and privacy) requirements they wish TREDISEC to fulfil.
Summary of work performed and main achievements
Since the project kick-off, on the 1st of April, until the 31st of December 2015, which spans from M1-M9 according to the project plan, the activities performed by the TREDISEC consortium can be structured along the following lines of work:
- Launching of the project and setting up the different procedures (quality, reporting, risk management, document/output storage and management, deliverable quality review, etc.), management structure, guidelines and supporting tools to enable a seamless and fruitful collaboration among the consortium partners, in order to achieve the project objectives and develop the work promised in the DoA according to the schedule. This has been described in a deliverable document released by M3, entitled “D1.1 Project Quality Assurance Plan”.
- Definition of the Innovation strategy for the project and agree on a plan to implement and deploy it within the existing project structures. This consisted in identifying the project key innovation points and specifying “innovation-related activities” such as monitoring, emergency plans, or take-up activities, definition of a framework for assessment of the project innovation health level and strategies to identifying and acquiring feedback from different entities and communities to better align the project results with users’ expectations. This has been described in a deliverable document released by M3, entitled “D1.5 Innovation Strategy and Plan”. In the last quarter of the period, a first innovation check has been done by the Innovation Director (from NEC) with the work-package leaders in relation to the identified key innovations of TREDISEC. The result was that, so far, there are no identified threats in the market to the expected TREDISEC innovations.
- Definition of a common project strategy for dissemination and communication of project advances and results, to set the base-line for individual partner’s activities, in order to reach the maximum impact possible. The strategy is accompanied with a plan that establishes a series of activities to promote the project along its entire duration, as well as a complete set of graphical material that supports these activities. The graphical material entails the project branding (i.e. logo, colour code, templates for documents, a poster and a promotional brochure/flyer); the project website (www.tredisec.eu) online since M2, is publicly accessible; this website is considered as the main point of contact from externals and as the first means for dissemination and communication of project advances and regular achievements (the website constitutes a deliverable and is described in the accompanying document “D7.1 TREDISEC public website”); social media accounts (i.e. dedicated LinkedIn group and twitter account); infographics ( within this period, one infographic has been made available through the website); and press releases and campaigns, to promote the project official start and the networking session at the ICT 2015 event, which TREDISEC was co-organised and where there was a scheduled talk about one specific project line of research. The communication and dissemination activities are grouped into phases, each one focusing on the promotion of certain aspects of the project, with customized key messages and targeting different type of audience (i.e. scientific, research, industry, citizens, public administration, policy-makers, etc.), making use of the most appropriate channel in each case. The dissemination and communication strategy and the associated implementation plans have been defined in two deliverable documents “D7.2 Dissemination plan” and “D7.3 Communication strategy and plan” respectively, both released in M6.
- Launching of the technical work-packages devoted to the research and development of the security primitives. Each of these work-packages, namely WP3, WP4 and WP5, focus in analysing first the different conflicts that may arise, when trying to satisfy at the same time cloud functional requirements (e.g. efficiency, reduced costs) while providing security guarantees (e.g. confidentiality, integrity); and second, researching on different schemes and primitives that overcome those conflicts.
- Description of the context scenarios and specification of the use cases that will be used to drive the technical developments and evaluate the project results. Four partners of the project (SAP, GRNET, ARSYS and MORPHO) described their context scenarios and use cases, which will be used in the project with two purposes: (i) to elicit a series of end-user requirements that will influence the design of the TREDISEC framework architecture and the security primitives developed in the technical work-packages (i.e. 3, 4 and 5); and (ii) to set up the context for the evaluation activities that will take place in the last year of the project in the context of WP6. The descriptions have been compiled into a deliverable document released by M6, entitled “D2.1 Description of the context scenarios and use cases definition”, which constitutes the achievement of the first project milestone: “MS1: Use cases and scenario context definition”.
- Specification of the requirements for the TREDISEC framework and the security primitives. As indicated in the previous point, the use case scenarios propose a series of requirements for TREDISEC technical activities from the user point of view. Besides these, the actual technological challenges the project aims to face, that is the lack of practical solutions that enable combining efficiency and security aspects in current cloud solutions, are also a source of requirements for the TREDISEC developments. All these requirements are listed and a trade-off analysis is described in a deliverable document entitled “D2.2 Requirements analysis and consolidation”, released in M9.
- Outline a proposal of architectural model for the TREDISEC framework, taking into account the requirements identified in Task 2.1. This first draft analysed first, various state of the art reference architectures of cloud systems, and second, proposed an approach that permits combinations of security primitives holistically working together in a range of cloud-based settings.
- Conduct an Initial prospect of the market and identification of suitable commercialization options for the TREDISEC outputs (i.e. the framework and the security primitives). In order to evaluate the most appropriate business model for TREDISEC that will influence the framework architecture, the implementation approach and operational model, on the one hand, and the exploitation strategies on the other hand.
The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Secure Identity Management in the Cloud Environment (SIMICE-2016) adjunct to the 40th IEEE Computer Society International Conference on Computer, Software&Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2016), will take place in Atlanta, Georgia, USA from 10th to 14th of June 2016.
The workshop is dedicated to the security and privacy aspects of identity management (IDM) in the cloud. Two tracks namely "Concept design and enbling technologies" and "Applications and evaluations" are planned to attract both theoretical and empirical works form the IDM society and the cloud computing society.
This workshop counts on TREDISEC participation. Julien Bringer, from SAFRAN Morpho, has worked in the project since the beginning, being responsible to develop specific use cases as initial test of the technology.
Julien Bringer will take part in SIMICE-2016 as co-organizer and member of the Program Committee that will evaluate the papers sent.
More details about the workshop here: http://staging.computer.org/web/compsac2016/simice
Abstract
With the advent of cloud computing, individuals and companies alike are looking for opportunities to leverage cloud resources not only for storage but also for computation. Nevertheless, the reliance on the cloud to perform computation raises the unavoidable challenge of how to assure the correctness of the delegated computation. In this regard, we introduce two cryptographic protocols for publicly verifiable computation that allow a lightweight client to securely outsource to a cloud server the evaluation of highdegree univariate polynomials and the multiplication of large matrices. Similarly to existing work, our protocols follow the amortized verifiable computation approach.
Furthermore, by exploiting the mathematical properties of polynomials and matrices, they are more efficient and give way to public delegatability. Finally, besides their efficiency, our protocols are provably secure under well-studied assumptions.
Atos Research & Innovation group (ARI), hub for research and development in new technologies and a key reference for the whole Atos group has launched the yearly report of Atos Research & Innovation (ARI) activities in 2015.
ARI focus is to investigate emerging technologies and anticipate market demand with innovative solutions.
This year, ARI has proved its success in several projects, providing innovative services to customers.
For instance, ARI has led TREDISEC project, which aims at increasing trust in cloud computing by designing new security
primitives ensuring data security and user privacy and supporting the underlying storage and computation technology at the same time.
In pages 37,38 of the booklet, it is available more details about on-going cybersecurity projects of the group, and more specifically about TREDISEC.
Atos Research & Innovation group (ARI), hub for research and development in new technologies and a key reference for the whole Atos group has launched the yearly report of Atos Research & Innovation (ARI) activities in 2015.
ARI focus is to investigate emerging technologies and anticipate market demand with innovative solutions.
This year, ARI has proved its success in several projects, providing innovative services to customers.
For instance, ARI has led TREDISEC project, which aims at increasing trust in cloud computing by designing new security
primitives ensuring data security and user privacy and supporting the underlying storage and computation technology at the same time.
In pages 37,38 of the booklet, it is available more details about on-going cybersecurity projects of the group, and more specifically about TREDISEC.
The Data Protection Security and Privacy (DPSP) in the Cloud Cluster has published the Whitepaper Challenges for trustworthy (multi-)Cloud-based services in the Digital Single Market.
The future Digital Single Market (DSM) poses a number of research challenges for future years. Particularly, the DSM Initiative #14 on “Free flow of data” directly impacts on a number of security and privacy issues on (multi-)cloud-based services and cloud services. The objective of this White paper is to develop an initial map of challenges identified by the DPSP Cluster projects related to the DSM Initiative #14 topics at the right level of abstraction that could be reused by the EC and policy makers. The map includes collection of the challenges more relevant for the next Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2018-2020.
With the title "IBM Scientists bring trust and reliability to the cloud with advanced cryptography in EU project" IBM Research blog has published an interview to IBM Scientists about the upcoming challenges of TREDISEC project and it´s impact on security and efficiency in tomorrow´s cloud.