Final Report Summary - PRISM CODE (Privacy and Security for Mobile Cooperative Devices) The PRISM CODE project (PRIvacy and Security for Mobile COoperative DEvices) had the aim to design some of the fundamental tools for privacy and security of the upcoming distributed services, that are built upon the cooperation of mobile personal devices like smartphones, PDAs, or tablets. In analogy with the geometric prism which is built on two parallel bases, the project is grounded on the beliefs that a wide adoption of cooperative services for mobile devices is possible only on the following two bases, to be present at the same time: privacy, to give users and other stakeholders some confidence that no private information will be disclosed by taking part in those services; and security, to guarantee (to some extent) that services will not be exploited in a malicious way (e.g. having no money loss for stakeholders). PRISM CODE has been a four-year project. The project has been executed by Dr. Mauro Conti (as Principal Investigator) at the University of Padua, Italy, which granted him a stable research position as Assistant Professor in 2011 (the position would have become permanent, and it did, upon a positive evaluation after the third year, i.e. the second year of the project).We believe that this Marie Curie fellowship has been key to boost the research results as well as the potential and the actual career development of the research fellow Dr. Mauro Conti. In fact, from the scientific point of view, Dr. Conti published in the four years of this project 36 journal papers and 70 conference papers in top venues in his research area. Furthermore, he published one book, five book chapters, edited four conference proceedings (for ACM SACMAT 2013, CRiSIS 2013, TRUST 2015, and for ICISS 2016), as well as served as program chair and journal associate editor. As far as it concerns gaining an high level of professional maturity and independence, a key fact is that in this period he founded and has been leading at the University of Padua the “SPRITZ Security and Privacy Research Group”, which currently includes among its members: 4 Postdocs, 13 PhD students (supervised or co-supervised by the research fellow) as well as 15 MSc students (several students already graduated in this time lapse, some of them being awarded for their thesis with national and international prizes). Furthermore, the group also enjoys several strong international collaborations. Finally, in terms of prospects for the permanent integration of the fellow, not only his Assistant Professor position became permanent in 2014, he also obtained the Italian National Habilitation as Associate Professor in the same year, and in 2015 he obtained a permanent Associate Professor position at the University of Padua, where he was running this research project.
