The KISS research initiative introduces the concept of Smart Cloud, whereby end users carry secure tokens managing their personal data instead of relying on cloud storage. Through a variety of innovative cryptographic technologies, a Smart Cloud also supports data federation and aggregation such as statistics, but in a built-in, privacy-respecting way.
Protecting user privacy on NFC-enabled mobile phones.
A personal data breach may, if left unaddressed in an adequate and timely manner, result in a substantial economy loss and social harm. A breach should be considered as adversely affecting the data or privacy of a subscriber or service user when it can result in, for example, a confidentiality breach, discrimination, unwanted exposure, loss of control, unauthorized commercial solicitations or damage to reputation. Innovative crypto can help.
An increasing amount of personal data is automatically gathered and stored on servers by administrations, hospitals, insurance companies, etc. Smart appliances surrounding individuals also accumulate spatio-temporal sensitive information (e.g., healthcare monitoring, geo-localization). Citizen themselves often count on internet companies to store their data and make them reliable and available through the internet. However, these benefits must be weighed against privacy risks incurred by centralization. Indeed, there are many examples of privacy violations arising from negligence, abusive use, attacks, and even the most secured servers are not spared.
The KISS research initiative draws a radically different vision of the management of personal data. It builds upon the emergence of new portable and secure devices (e.g., mass storage SIM card, secure USB stick, smart sensor) combining the security of smart cards and the storage capacity of NAND Flash chips. The idea promoted in KISS is to embed, in such devices, software components capable of acquiring, storing and managing securely personal data. These software components form a full-fledged Personal Data Server which can remain under holder’s control. However, our approach does not amount to a simple secure repository of personal data. The ambition is threefold. The first objective is to allow the development of new, powerful, user-centric applications thus requiring a well organized, structured and queryable representation of user’s data. Second, we want to provide the data holder with a friendly control over the sharing conditions related to her data and to provide the data recipient with certified information related to their provenance. Third, to give sense to this vision, Personal Data Servers must provide traditional database services like durability, query facilities, transactions and must be able to interoperate with external data sources.
Converting the Personal Data Server vision into reality introduces three main challenges:
To tackle these challenges, the KISS consortium relies on the complementary skills of its members and on their past experience to work together: embedded data management (INRIA), access and usage control management (LIRIS), management of widely distributed data and ambient intelligence (UVSQ & LIRIS), cryptography (INRIA & CryptoExperts), smartcard and secure token technology (Gemalto) and finally real use-cases in the context of e-administration (Yvelines District General Council).
The applicability and versatility of the KISS architecture will be demonstrated by the development of two different proofs of concept (e-administration and ambient intelligence). Our objective is that KISS provides an alternative approach to the current systematic centralization of personal data on third-party servers and paves the way for new privacy-by-design solutions dedicated to the management of personal data.