Keynotes

Title

Co-utility: Rational Co-operation for Privacy, Security and Functionality in the Information Society

Abstract

A major problem in the global information society is the lack of a worldwide legal framework accepted by all countries. This raises the issue of how to protect the legitimate interests of the various players in information transactions. Protocols for information technology transactions should be designed so that the best interest of any protocol participant leads her to act in such a way that she serves the best interest of the other protocol participants. This will allow effortlessly achieving a fair operation of the information society as the result of rational co-operation rather than as an expensive legal requirement.

We introduce the novel concept of co-utility or co-operative utility, which can be defined in game-theoretic terms: a protocol offers co-utility or is co-utile if the best option for a player to maximize her utility is to co-operate with one or more other players to maximize their utility. Reasonable components of utility in the information society are security, privacy and functionality. The privacy component of co-utility corresponds to the co-privacy property that we have recently introduced. The co-utility property makes an individual's utility maximization a goal that rationally interests other individuals: it is a matter of helping oneself by helping someone else. Co-utility is a groundbreaking concept because it opens the way to a joint and coordinated treatment of privacy, security and functionality. We formally define co-utility in terms of game equilibria and we illustrate its use in several practical applications:
i) anonymous keyword search; ii) content disclosure in social networks; iii) fingerprinted multicast and digital oblivion. We also give an overview of our recent cryptographic primitives to achieve the gradual privacy required by some co-utile protocols.

Biography

Josep Domingo-Ferrer (Sabadell, Catalonia, 1965) is a Full Professor of Computer Science and an ICREA-Acadèmia Researcher at Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Catalonia, where he holds the UNESCO Chair in Data Privacy. He received his M. Sc. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 1988 and 1991 (Outstanding Graduation Award). He also holds an M. Sc. in Mathematics. His research interests are in data privacy, data security, statistical disclosure control and cryptographic protocols, with a focus on the conciliation of privacy, security and functionality. He is an IEEE Fellow. He won the 1st Edition of the ICREA Acadèmia Prize 2008 awarded by the Government of Catalonia, which distinguished him as one of the 40 research leaders among faculty members in public Catalan universities. Between 2007 and 2008, he was a co-recipient of four entrepreneurship prizes. Between 2003 and 2004, he received two research prizes. He has authored 5 patents and over 280 publications. He has been the co-ordinator of EU FP5 project CO-ORTHOGONAL and of several Spanish funded and U.S. funded research projects. He currently co-ordinates the CONSOLIDER "ARES" team on security and privacy, one of Spain's 34 strongest research teams. He has chaired 13 international conferences and has served in the program committee of over 140 conferences on privacy and security. He is a co-Editor-in-Chief of "Transactions on Data Privacy", an Area Editor of "Computer Communications", and an Associate Editor of the "Journal of Official Statistics". He has been an Outstanding Invited Professor at Università di Roma 3 (2011), a Visiting Researcher at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (2005) and a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University (2004). He was a Visiting Ph.D. Student at the Siemens Central R+D Department, München (1990) and at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (1990).

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Josep Domingo-Ferrer

Title

Conformance to legal requirements: The last frontier for privacy research

Abstract

Privacy protection systems must conform to legal requirements. These requirements must be identified and extracted from legal textstobecome implementation requirements. This is a complex endeavor, in part because legal texts are based on implicit ontologies that should be well understood although in reality they are fuzzy and unstable. These ontologies can be drawn from all fields of knowledge, including science,ethics, as well as common sense; accordingly, they may be as hard to represent and implement as anything a software engineer can become involved with. The implementation of the law and of its underlying ontologies must be shown (and possibly certified) to be conformant with the requirements, by means such as formal verification or testing. This talk will discuss some of the research challenges that are met in this area, together with some possible solutions.

Biography

Luigi Logrippo received a "laurea" in law from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" in 1961, and in the same year he wrote his first computer program. After some years in the computer industry, in the late sixties and early seventies he went to the University of Manitoba, where he obtained a MSc in Computer Science, and then to the University of Waterloo where he obtained a PhD in the same discipline. After that he was professor of Computer Science at the University of Ottawa for almost thirty years. He is now professor of Computer Science at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. Formal techniques in software have been his constant interest. Notably, he worked for many years on the application and development of the algebraic formal language LOTOS in the areas of telecommunications protocols and telephony systems. Formal methods in security are his current research area, together with a return of interest in formal methods for the interpretation of legal texts.

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Luigi Logrippo