Distributed Privacy-Preserving Policy Reconciliation

• Applicant: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Ulrike Meyer
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems
• Term: from 2010 to 2015
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 185306817

Enabling collaboration between different parties is a very challenging task. A major difficulty lies in reaching an agreement on the policy rules that should govern the collaboration of the (two or more) partners. Each party has to express its desired rules in a common format and follow a protocol with the other parties. The process will determine which rules control their future collaboration. This protocol is generally referred to as reconciliation protocol and its output is a policy that is consistent with the requirements of all the parties involved. If such a policy exists, the parties can continue their collaboration. Otherwise, they can decide not to collaborate or they can decide to modify their individual requirements and repeat the protocol. While state-of-the-art policy reconciliation mechanisms will in fact allow the parties to reconcile their polices, today’s mechanisms have two main shortcomings. First, today’s mechanisms require that at least one of the parties discloses all its information in order to allow for the reconciliation process to work. Second, the mechanisms by-and-large do not allow to recognize a party’s preferences in a privacy-preserving manner. It is in this context that this proposal outlines a comprehensive research agenda that introduces both fair preference optimization and privacy into the policy reconciliation process.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Participating Person: Professorin Dr.-Ing. Susanne Wetzel