PerSoCloud - Personal and Social Trusted Cloud

Project Description:

With the convergence of mobile communications, sensors and online social networks technologies, we are witnessing an exponential increase in the acquisition of personal data. All these data end up in corporate servers or in the Cloud and introduce an unprecedented threat on privacy. The PerSoCloud project aims at designing and implementing a robust proof-of-concept of a full-fledged Privacy-by-Design Personal Cloud Sharing Platform, and validating it with jurists and sociologists.

The Personal Cloud is a paradigm giving users the ability to store their complete digital environment, synchronize it among various devices and share it with other users and applications under their control. Several academic works have already tackled different dimensions of the personal cloud problem and some pioneer systems are arising in the market place, usually with limited functionalities in terms of data sharing and privacy protection. The PerSoCloud project precisely tackles the sharing and privacy issue from the architectural angle, following a fully decentralized approach. We identify three major dimensions of the problem: (1) device sharing (sharing owner's data among the various devices of a same user), (2) peer-sharing (sharing personal data among identified collaborating users) and (3) community-sharing (sharing personal data among a large community of users), all this with strong privacy guarantees.