Section: New Results

Introduction

The work conducted this year can be separated in two areas. The first area concerns the experimental work which monopolized a lot of our energy in 2009. As stated above, the PlugDB technology is being experimented in the field with about 120 practitioners and patients. This imposed us a strong investment in terms of test and optimization to reach an acceptable level of robustness and efficiency for our prototype.

The second area concerns the research work itself. While most research actions are continuation of studies initiated earlier, we are now considering them in a more integrated and global vision that we call Personal Data Servers. The objective of this vision is to provide a credible alternative to a systematic centralization of personal data in servers. Indeed, the benefits of the server approach come at the price of a higher exposition of personal data to piracy and abusive use and of a loose of the control of the donor over his data. The objective is to study whether a complete information system could be organized by agglomerating distributed Personal Data Servers (PDS), each PDS remaining under the donor's control and being hardware protected. A large list of challenges remains to be solved to reach this goal: (1) how to guarantee acceptable performance for large embedded databases; (2) how to restore the traditional functions of central servers (availability, durability, global queries, data publishing, auditing, etc) with high security guarantees and (3) how to provide the user with tractable access and usage control models. The works presented below must be considered as preliminary joint attempts to reach this ambitious goal.