UBITECH participates in the kick-off meeting (that takes place at January 15-16,2015 at Karlsruhe, Germany) of the PaaSword research project, officially started at January 1st, 2015. Funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, the 3-year PaaSword project focuses on the development of Cloud Security technologies and, in particular, in the implementation of an encrypted and physically distributed persistence as a Platform-as-a-Service capability for Cloud-enabled applications and services. More specifically, PaaSword introduces a holistic data privacy and security by design framework enhanced by sophisticated context-aware policy access models and robust policy access, decision, enforcement and governance mechanisms, which will enable the implementation of secure and transparent Cloud-based applications and services that will maintain a fully distributed and totally encrypted data persistence layer, and, thus, will foster customers’ data protection, integrity and confidentiality, even in the case wherein there is no control over the underlying third-party Cloud resources utilized.
Within PaaSword, UBITECH undertakes the technical lead of the project’s research activities, while UBITECH R&D team will heavily contribute and lead the technological choices towards the definition and design of the a holistic data privacy and security by design framework that will enable application developers to implement secure and transparent Cloud-based services, incorporating security and data protection features in the Cloud-based application itself at application design time. Moreover, UBITECH will significantly contribute in the definition of a context-aware policy access model and implement the XACML compliant context-aware security model for declaratively describing access control policies, which are easily interpretable into policy enforcement rules and will be used by the developer in order to annotate the Data Access Objects (DAOs) of his/her application. Finally, UBITECH will lead the development of all the appropriate mechanisms for forming the policies access, decision and enforcement middleware, which will encapsulate capabilities for maintaining the access policies model, for annotating and managing data access object annotations, for controlling their validity, for dynamically interpreting them into policy enforcement rules and for enforcing these policies at the application’s run time.
