Monat: August 2016

How can we protect our information in the era of cloud computing?

In an article published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, Professor Jon Crowcroft argues that by parcelling and spreading data across multiple sites, and weaving it together like a tapestry, not only would our information be safer, it would be quicker to access, and could potentially be stored at lower overall cost.
The internet is a vast, decentralised communications system, with minimal administrative or governmental oversight. However, we increasingly access our information through cloud-based services, such as Google Drive, iCloud and Dropbox, which are very large centralised storage and processing systems. Cloud-based services offer convenience to the user, as their data can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, but their centralised nature can make them vulnerable to attack, such as when personal photos of mostly young and female celebrities were leaked last summer after their iCloud accounts were hacked.
Storing information in the cloud makes it easily accessible to users, while removing the burden of managing it; and the cloud’s highly centralised nature keeps costs low for the companies providing the storage. However, centralised systems can lack resilience, meaning that service can be lost when any one part of the network access path fails.
Centralised systems also give a specific point to attack for those who may want to access them illegally. Even if data is copied many times, if all the copies have the same flaw, they are all vulnerable. Just as a small gene pool places a population at risk from a change in the environment, such as a disease, the lack of variety in centralised storage systems places information at greater risk of theft.
The alternative is a decentralised system, also known as a peer-to-peer system, where resources from many potential locations in the network are mixed, rather than putting all one’s eggs in one basket.
The strength of a peer-to-peer system is that its value grows as the number of users increases: all producers are also potential consumers, so each added node gives the new producer as many customers as are already on the network.
“Since all the members of a peer-to-peer network are giving as well as consuming resources, it quickly overtakes a centralised network in terms of its strength,” said Crowcroft, of the University’s Computer Laboratory.
The higher reliability and performance of fibre to the home, the availability of 4G networks, and IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) are all helping to make decentralised networks viable. In practice, a user would carry most of the data they need to access immediately with them on their mobile device, with their home computer acting as the ‘master’ point of contact.
“Essentially, data is encoded redundantly, but rather than making many copies, we weave a tapestry using the bits that represent data, so that threads making up particular pieces of information are repeated but meshed together with threads making up different pieces of information,” said Crowcroft. “Then to dis-entangle a particular piece of information, we need to unpick several threads.”
Varying the ways that our information is stored or distributed is normally done to protect against faults in the network, but it can also improve the privacy of our data. In a decentralised system where data is partitioned across several sites, any attacker attempting to access that data has a much more complex target – the attacker has to know where all bits of the information are, as opposed to using brute force at one point to access everything. “The more diversity we use in a peer-to-peer system, the closer we get to an ideal in terms of resilience and privacy,” said Crowcroft.
A peer-to-peer system could also be built at a lower overall cost than a centralised system, argues Crowcroft, since no ‘cache’ is needed in order to store data near the user. To the end user, costs could be as low as a pound per month, or even free, much lower than monthly internet access costs or mobile tariffs.
“We haven’t seen massive take-up of decentralised networks yet, but perhaps that’s just premature,” said Crowcroft. “We’ve only had these massive centralised systems for about a decade, and like many other utilities, the internet will most likely move away from centralisation and towards decentralisation over time, especially as developments in technology make these systems attractive for customers.”
Private information would be much more secure if individuals moved away from cloud-based storage towards peer-to-peer systems, where data is stored in a variety of ways and across a variety of sites, argues a University of Cambridge researcher.
The more diversity we use in a peer-to-peer system, the closer we get to an ideal in terms of resilience and privacyJon Crowcroftg4ll4isPrivacyThe text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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Trust on the wild web

Mark Zuckerberg is the world’s youngest billionaire. He got there by founding facebook.com, one of the biggest beasts in the Internet jungle. In the early days, so the story goes, he boasted to a friend on instant messenger that he had the personal details of over 4,000 students in Harvard, and if he ever wanted to know anything he should get in touch. Understandably, his incredulous friend wanted to know how Zuckerberg had access to this information. His reply? ‘People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They trust me, dumbf***s.’
The online environment is no longer merely an aid to living well offline; for many, it has become a forum where much of life is now conducted. But one issue that raises its head again and again is this question of trust on the Internet.
Examining whether and how we can design the Internet for online trust is the focus of my research in the Faculty of Philosophy, supervised by Dr Alex Oliver. The project is sponsored by Microsoft Research, whose Socio-Digital Systems group in Cambridge looks at how technology interacts with human values.
The research is a chance to do some practical philosophy, reflecting on and engaging with applied issues. And as the Internet increasingly becomes a more pervasive part of our lives, issues of trust online are only going to grow in importance. So there is a unique and timely opportunity – and challenge – to break new terrain.

Trusting me, trusting you
It is easily overlooked, but when you stop to think, it is striking how much we trust to other people. It is a fundamental precondition for the smooth functioning of society. Like the air we breathe, or the cement in brickwork, trust is both essential and usually taken for granted.
One consequence is that we tend to notice our reliance on trust only when things go wrong. And although it is easy to eulogise trust, it is not always appropriate. Trusting the untrustworthy is often a dramatically bad idea. But distrusting the trustworthy may have equally serious consequences.
Certainly, most people want to live in a world where it makes sense to trust people, and for people to trust them. But they also don’t want to be taken for a ride. So we have to work out when trust is appropriate.
The trouble is, it is much harder to work out online when trust is appropriate and when not. It is much more difficult to determine online whether a particular person is trustworthy – much of the personal and social context of offline forms of interaction are stripped away in cyberspace, and online identities can be less stable.
But perhaps more seriously, it is still relatively unclear what the norms and mores are that govern appropriate behaviour online. This applies both to the informal norms that spontaneously arise in interpersonal interaction, and also to the apparatus of formal law.
The web, in this sense, is a bit like the Wild West. It is not that life is impossible there – far from it. Indeed, it’s often pretty flamboyant and colourful, and a stimulating place to be. But people can also act unpredictably, and there is little recourse for those who get stung.

Building trust
One moral of the story about the Facebook founder’s comment is that you’ve got to be careful who you trust online. That’s obvious enough, and no different to what we tell our children.
But there are some more challenging issues. For the online world has an important feature: it is malleable. How something is built often serves particular ends, whether intended or not, and these ends in turn serve to realise particular visions of how people ought to live. Were I a metalsmith, for instance, I would rather make ploughs than thumbscrews – I don’t want to contribute to making a world where thumbscrews are plentiful.
This applies to contemporary technologies too. At the last count, 500 million people now have their social relationships partially structured by Zuckerberg’s vision of connecting people, according to whether they have confirmed or ignored the one-size-fits-all ‘friends request’ on facebook.com. The basic IP/TCP structures of the Internet were built according to a broadly libertarian vision widely shared among the early computer science pioneers, which denies central control or ownership in order to facilitate free expression.
So the more pertinent question is: can we build the Internet in a way that facilitates well-placed trust, and encourages trustworthiness? In short, can we design for online trust? To answer this, we need to look at why people are trustworthy and untrustworthy; what counts as good evidence for a person’s trustworthiness online; the effects of online anonymity and pseudonymity; and the role of institutions in grounding trustworthiness. For instance, one mechanism through which we can secure others’ trustworthiness is to develop better online reputation systems and track past conduct.
These questions cannot be answered once and for all. Technology is dynamic: #cloud computing, for instance, is considered by many to be a step change in the way we compute, and it too raises specific questions around trust (see panel). As technology changes, so too will the philosophical challenges. The hope is that collaborative work between computer engineers, lawyers and philosophers can help to make the Internet a safer place.

For further information, please contact Tom Simpson (tws21@cam.ac.uk), whose PhD research in the Faculty of Philosophy (www.phil.cam.ac.uk/) is being sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge. His article on ‘e-Trust and Reputation’ is published in Ethics and Information Technology.

Philosopher Tom Simpson asks: can we build a trustworthy and safe Internet?
Engineering is always about solving problems for people and the society in which they live. Philosophy can help understand what those problems are and how they are to be solved.

Professor Richard Harper, Microsoft Research Cambridge©iStockPhoto.com/Amanda RohdeDigital trustCloud computingCloud computing is widely heralded as one of the most radical changes to the way we compute, and its full impact is thought to be just around the corner. First and foremost, the cloud is a change in the geography of computing – instead of having your PC store your data and run everything, your computing will be done on banks of servers and accessed remotely. Along with the change in geography, the move to the cloud is also a change in the scale of computing, with access to far more powerful computing facilities than ever before.
But the cloud raises a host of philosophical issues, particularly questions of responsibility. Who should own what data? When are ‘crowd-sourcing’ techniques appropriate, and when not? What are the effects of more powerful techniques of profiling individuals? What happens to privacy when we compute in the cloud?
To discuss these and related issues, the Faculty of Philosophy and Microsoft Research are co-hosting an international conference in Cambridge, gathering together leading philosophers and practitioners. Two open lectures will be held on the evenings of 5 and 6 April 2011.
For further details, please visit trustandcloudcomputing.org.uk

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Cloud computing and the philosophy of trust

The event takes place today and tomorrow, and is hosted by the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, and supported by Microsoft Research. An international workshop of world-renowned philosophers, ethicists, sociologists and practitioners will discuss the philosophical issues surrounding #cloud computing, a concept that has been described as one of the most radical changes to the way we compute. There will also be two public lectures at Corpus Christi, Cambridge.

Cloud computing is first and foremost a change in the geography of computing. Instead of the hardware on your computer doing the computing, the data storage and processing are carried out by hardware held in a different location. Facebook, Gmail and Flickr are well-known examples of computing in the cloud; a widespread move to cloud computing would see third-party servers providing nearly all computing needs, with users accessing software and data as needed.

Benefits claimed for cloud computing include access to far more powerful computing facilities than ever before, convenience and reliability of communications, greater flexibility for a mobile workforce, and a cost-effective alternative for businesses needing to maintain an up-to-date IT infrastructure.

But the provision of computing as a utility also raises philosophical issues, particularly questions of responsibility. Among these are who should own what data, and what happens to privacy when we compute in the cloud? How do we ensure the trustworthiness of those who manage the cloud, so that people use it confidently? And what is it about their computing practices that lead people to want the cloud?

To discuss these and related issues, the conference has gathered together delegates from institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rutgers, Institute Marcel Mauss, Paris, TU Delft, and the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford.

“We have a choice about how we build and regulate the cloud,” said Dr Alex Oliver, from Cambridge’s Faculty of Philosophy. “The aim of the event is to initiate a new discussion on how the internet and cloud computing is changing business and personal relationships in the cloud era.”

The public lecture this evening will be given by Dr David D. Clark, Senior Research Scientist, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, MIT, at 6pm. Tomorrow’s lecture will be by Professor Ian Kerr, Canada Research Chair in Ethics, Law and Technology, University of Ottawa, at 5pm. Both lectures will be held in the McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi, Cambridge.
Some of the world’s finest minds in academic philosophy are debating the impact of the internet and cloud computing in Cambridge this week.
We have a choice about how we build and regulate the cloud.Dr Alex OliverFaculty of PhilosophyCloud computing

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Privacy by design

Online services that store our personal information have proliferated, yet the technology to underpin how our privacy is safeguarded has lagged behind. This was the conclusion of a 2008 report by the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, a body set up to uphold privacy for individuals, which pressed for “the evolution of a new approach to the management of personal information that ingrains privacy principles into every part of every system in every organisation.”

This ethos underpins research led by Professor Jon Crowcroft, the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Laboratory. Two projects he leads aim to minimise privacy risks, and at the heart of both is the concept of ‘privacy by design’.

“Privacy by design means that it’s in-built as part of the technology, rather than bolted on in order to comply with data protection laws,” he explained. “With privacy by design, it would simply not be possible for incidents such as the leaking of LinkedIn passwords to happen.”

One project is tackling the challenge of how to maintain privacy when all your data are stored by a central service – the so-called cloud. Anyone who stores images on flickr, or accesses emails from a central server, is #cloud computing, and today many businesses are turning to centralised data centres as an economic means of storing their information. However, concerns have also been raised about the scale of control that cloud service providers wield over the data they store and can potentially monitor.

Crowcroft and colleague Dr Anil Madhavapeddy are building technologies to support the control of networked personal data as part of a five-year £12 million research hub (‘Horizon’), which is led by the University of Nottingham and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The research is driven by the overarching concept of a lifelong contextual footprint – the idea that each of us throughout our lifetime will lay down a digital trail that captures our patterns of interaction with digital services – and how best to protect this.

A second project, FRESNEL (for ‘Federated Secure Sensor Network Laboratory’), is focusing on privacy in networks that people use to modify their heating, lighting and home entertainment when they are not at home, as well as networks that monitor traffic flow and air quality, and enable a doctor in hospital to check a patient’s health at home.

“Current technologies have usually been devised for single-owner sensor networks that are deployed and managed by a central controlling entity, usually a company that has set themselves up to offer this capability,” he said. “They don’t have the right scalability and security required to deal with a secure multi-purpose federated sensor network, running different applications in parallel. Our aim is to build a network framework with multiple applications sharing the same resources.”

With funding from EPSRC, Crowcroft and Dr Cecilia Mascolo and colleagues, working with Dr Ian Brown at the University of Oxford and industrial project partners, now have a demonstrator program in operation that is currently being evaluated through a large-scale federation of sensor networks across the University of Cambridge.

The aim of these projects, explained Crowcroft, is not to lock up personal data, removing the ability to socialise it, but rather to support systems that process data without sacrificing privacy: “We are building technologies to support lifelong control of networked personal data. For instance, a significant driver behind social networking has been the ecosystem of data processors that aggregate and provide services such as recommendations, location searches or messaging. But the big drawback is that users have to divulge more of their personal data to a third party than is necessary, because of the difficulty of distinguishing what is needed. Our research starts from a single premise – that individuals require control over access to, and use of, their personal data for ever.”

Crowcroft and colleagues have launched a not-for-profit foundation, Digital Life Foundation, which will build an open-source community around these technologies.

For more information, please contact Louise Walsh (louise.walsh@admin.cam.ac.uk) at the University of Cambridge Office of External Affairs and Communications.
New research aims to ensure that we can exploit the full benefits of the digital world and still protect our online privacy.
We are building technologies to support lifelong control of networked personal data.Professor Jon Crowcroft©iStockPhoto.com/Marilyn NievesOnline privacy

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Quelle: University of Cambridge