The project has advanced state of the art and produced innovations on all the planned objectives.
Objective 1 - Rich support of requirements. The project has considered four use cases, corresponding to real-world problems of the industrial/SME partners. Thanks to the richness and complementarity of the use cases, the project has provided a comprehensive list of requirements to be addressed in different cloud-based scenarios. The requirement analysis covers different aspects of the problem of ensuring effective protection to data in the cloud, from basic storage, to fine-grained retrieval, controlled sharing, and federated contexts.
Objective 2 - Self-protection of data. The project has produced novel solutions for providing self-protection for data, hence empowering owners with effective control on their resources. These solutions have been realized in cloud platforms and some have also been made available open source. The solutions included advanced approaches for key management, fork-consistency, fine-grained retrieval and query execution on encrypted data.
Objective 3 - Secure information sharing. The project has developed novel solutions for enabling data owners to effectively regulate access to their data, even when such data are not under their direct control. ESCUDO-CLOUD new technology enables selective and controlled information sharing, among users as well as among data authorities/providers involved in collaborative distributed computations. In the context of distributed query processing, the project has also developed novel probabilistic techniques for enabling data owners to assess the integrity of the result of queries performed by possibly untrusted providers.
Objective 4 - Multi cloud and federated cloud. The project has investigated multi-cloud and federated cloud scenarios, developing approaches to support users in the definition of requirements and in the identification of suitable services. The project has also developed an innovative solution in the form of Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) framework, allowing data owners to store and control the access to their data in a multi-cloud environment.
Objective 5 - Effective exploitation. Thank you to the participation of industrial partners representing first-class players in the cloud scenarios, and to the use cases provided by them, the technological solutions developed in the project have seen direct exploitation, and their exploitation will continue after the end of the project. IBM data-at-rest protection and key management have contributed to the OpenStack open-source distribution, and some of the technologies are already included in the current stable released; SAP has developed technology suitable for use in the company's HANA database; BT DPaaS framework is part of the portfolio of services offered to BT’s customers; WT and EMC has employed custom solutions tailored to the need of the companies. In addition, also solutions developed by academic partners have been made available open-source to the wide research and development community, enabling others to build on the project results.
