Confidential and Compliant Clouds (COCO CLOUD)

Framework: FP7 — Cooperation
Programme: Information and Communication Technologies
Destination: Pervasive and Trusted Network and Service Infrastructures
Action type: Collaborative project
Countries involved: Italy,United Kingdom,Norway,Germany,Spain,Spain
Call:  (FP7-ICT-2013-10, 2013)
Start date: 2013-11-01
End date: 2016-10-31
Duration (months): 36.0
Total project cost (EUR): 4669616.0
EU funding (EUR): 2799867.0
Participants: 9
Project status: CLOSED

Confidential and Compliant Clouds (Coco Cloud) aims at allowing the cloud users to securely and privately share their data in the cloud. This will increase the trust of users in the cloud services and thus increase their widespread adoption with consequent benefits for the users and in general for digital economy. The outsourced nature of the Cloud, and the inherent loss of control that goes along with that, means that sensitive data must be carefully controlled to ensure it is always protected (in the most appropriate way for a given situation). Protecting data (including personal information) is essential to citizens, governments and organizations across all sectors, including healthcare and banking. Furthermore, it is only by providing assurances on data protection and data usage control, that we can facilitate data sharing between individuals and organisations or between organisations to create new ventures and novel means of leveraging the data value. We envision the control of the disseminated data based on mutually agreed data sharing agreements that are uniformly and end-to-end enforced. These agreements may reflect legal, contractual or user defined preferences, which may be conflicting and thus an appropriate balance and model for their enforcement must be found. The project aims at creating an efficient and flexible framework for secure data management from the client to the cloud, and vice-versa. We consider in particular three dimensions to this goal: i. to facilitate the writing, understanding, analysis, management, enforcement and dissolution of data sharing agreements; going from high level descriptions (close to natural language) to system enforceable data usage policies; ii. to consider the most appropriate enforcing mechanisms depending on the underlying infrastructure and context for enforcing data usage policies; iii. to address key challenges for legally compliant data sharing in the cloud. By taking a “compliance by design” approach, the project places an early emphasis on understanding and incorporating legal and regulatory requirements into the data sharing agreements. Coco Cloud will contribute to fulfil the pervasive need for data usage protection in cloud services that arises from different stakeholders, including business organizations and citizens, and overcoming the limitations of currently available technology offerings. The project Consortium combines strong industry players and academic institutions which will deliver high quality research and development; it also includes two end-users of the technological solutions as well as a Law firm able to bring significant expertise in legal practice, also for Cloud. The project outcome will be evaluated via three pilot products and one industrial test bed.

Keywords: data sharing agreements,data and privacy protection,data usage control,policy refinement,validation and context-aware policy enforcement,natural language policies,legal and regulatory aspects