PRISMACLOUD - PRIvacy and Security MAintaining services in the CLOUD

Introduction

The EU Horizon 2020 PRISMACLOUD - PRIvacy and Security MAintaining services in the CLOUD - research project is dedicated to enabling secure and trustworthy cloud-based services by improving and adopting novel tools from cryptographic research.

The project brings novel cryptographic concepts and methods to practical application to improve the security and privacy of cloud based services and make them usable for providers and users. The main idea and ambition of PRISMACLOUD is to enable end-to-end security for cloud users and provide tools to protect their privacy with the best technical means possible - by cryptography.

Who is the project designed for?

The vertical markets we are targeting with our solutions are smart cities, e-government and e-health domain, all typically dealing with sensitive data about end-users and citizens. However, this is only for demonstration purposes and our solutions are relevant beyond these scenarios and be used to protect critical assets in many other cloudified scenarios.

For the Smart City domain, a more privacy friendly and cloudified version of the ICT implementation of the European Disable Badge for public parking areas was achieved. Additionally, more secure mechanisms for cloud based data storage and sharing of different video data generated by the CCTV cameras in public spaces was developed.

Thanks to PRISMACLOUD services, e-Government providers will now take advantage of a secured, distributed storage system allowing them to use resources more efficiently and periodically check backup integrity/reliability. Additionally, public bodies will receive certified evidence that their virtual infrastructure is isolated from the ones of other customers.

The e-Health services developed in PRISMACLOUD aim to support secure and privacy friendly interaction between patients and healthcare providers or between different hospital services and the clinicians. The project results have already been integrated into FCSR’s Trusted Healthcare Platform (THP) to add several privacy and security features.

How is your project benefitting the end-user?

In PRISMACLOUD we developed a toolbox to build more secure and privacy friendly cloud services. We also developed a portfolio of 8 services which demonstrate the advancements and can be use by service providers or system and application developers to enrich their solutions. However, given all these results which are affecting the business domain, PRISMACLOUD will directly impact end-users if the solutions which integrate the services are rolled out.

In the smart city domain, it will better protect the privacy of users in systems managing parking lots for disabled people or better protect the privacy of citizens which are on digital evidences collected by law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, users maintaining their personal health records in the cloud will be enables to selectively share the data in a secure and trustworthy way and data collected in medical studies will be anonymized accordingly, also on large scale.

Please briefly describe the results your project achieved so far

PRISMACLOUD provides solutions for more secure and privacy friendly cloud usage on several levels or layers, which accompany the development of the demo applications for the case study.

We provide solutions on methodological level, i.e., holistic security models for developed services and applications as well as a new development methodology (CryptSDL) which extends classical approaches to assist in the complexity of secure cryptographic service design.

We developed a portfolio of 8 specific ready to use cloud services with increased security and privacy. Some examples are a Selective Authentic Exchange service based on redactable signatures (SAEaaS), a Verifiable Statistics service for authentic data aggregation (VSaaS) and Big Data Anonymization service for large sets of data (BDAaaS).

Additionally, in line with the main goal of PRISMACLOUD to advance the state-of-the-art in cryptographic methods for cloud computing we also achieved significant research results. Some of the most promising solutions have also been implemented in software and build the basis for our services. The cryptographic functionality has been encapsulated in the so called PRISMACLOUD toolbox which is the core results the other rely there security on by design.

What are the next steps for your project?

The next steps are to commercialize the services and tools developed within PRISMACLOUD with our partners and to explore applications of our results that go beyond the use-cases within PRISMACLOUD. Moreover, we are actively involved in standardization efforts to standardize results obtained within the project.