The aim of this work package is to conduct research focusing on converging technologies and networked ecosystems.
Predicting the future and the evolving of the contemporary, unified Internet into a heterogeneously networked Ecosystem of Ecosystems, demands the study and design of ecosystem architectures and protocols. Besides the technical challenges, there are also significant legal questions to answer, starting from the legality of access to data in multiple (remote) multi-jurisdictional environments and ending with the protection of European key-values such as data (privacy) protection.
Data protection in networked ecosystems
So-called “sticky (data) policies” regulate data exchange, processing, aggregation and storage. In an ever-growing networked ecosystem the aggregation of data and their attached (sticky) policies will lead to an exponential growth of data and policies that yield to a semantic and computational complexity impossible to handle in real-world environments. In view of this Task 1.1 will explore the benefit/cost balance of sticky data policies in the light of data (privacy) protection and forensic readiness. ESR2: research will focus on understanding how system interoperability is affected by the sticky data policies. The aim is to design a theoretical concept for sticky data policies in a distributed and service-oriented IT ecosystem.
Digital Forensics for crime prevention and intelligence analysis
Fraud detection and criminal analysis in the modern digitally-connected society is becoming increasingly data intensive and widely distributed. This task will contribute to the analysis of fraud and crime by using advanced computational methods and resource intense computing architectures. This task will explore the technological and social-technical controls in the acquisition and analysis of digital evidence, i.e. native digital evidence and digitized physical evidence, such as paper documents. Further-on, advanced computational models shall be designed and implemented as a proof of concept.
Cryptography and end-to-end trust assurance
Advances in cryptographic tools and their increasing use in private communications require a change in the design of architectures for legal interception. This task will study the technological challenges produced by encryption to the development of surveillance technology.