International Co-operation in Trustworthy,
Secure and Dependable ICT infrastructures

The first external mission took place in February 2008 with the goal of understanding the Australian ICT-Security programs/profile and exploring the possibilities for joint ICT TSPD activities.

Working meetings were held with Australian government and other relevant research communities. The mission resulted in a significant number of contacts with whom we shall pursue areas of potential collaboration and contribution to the working groups when established..

The research areas identified for potential collaboration include:

• Security and Trust issues within the future internet, and Web 2.0;
• distributed authorization;
• trust management;
• security-enhancing mobile agents;
• mobile and wireless network security etc. - very core technologies that are (a) implementation independent and (b) very applicable for future internet models (seen as high priority).
• user-centric privacy and identity management (see below).

There was general agreement that participation in the working groups should be by invitation, while at the same time maintaining openness (invitation to position papers and selection).

Contact with researchers directly funded by the federal government was through National ICT Australia (NICTA). Similar in concept to INRIA and Fraunhofer, they are a “technology incubator & transfer” entity with active links to the universities and national research organizations. They are already participating in EU collaborative R&D within FP7. Their main themes are Networks & Networked Systems; Embedded Systems; Managing Complexity (of System Design); Machine Learning. Their preference is for large-scale, longer-term projects that have practical outcomes and realizable impact. A high push area for NICTA is real networking impact in the mobile space, mobile content delivery, authentication and privacy issues.

A further area of mutual interest was the possibility for establishing linkages to international test-beds, in which there is already an Australian participation.

An indication of the importance of information and privacy governance in Australia may be seen in the shift of responsibility for the agency dealing with Privacy and Freedom of Information from the Attorney General to the office of the Prime Minister.

Meetings with the academic and business research communities also explored common issues and mutual priorities.

Priorities in the academic area were seen to concern STPD in the heterogeneous, polymorphic environments where multiple technologies come together to improve quality of user’s experiences and life, in particular the pervasive mobile, distributed communications, computing, and SOA-based information services. This in turn raises requirements for scalable, policy –based, authentication and authorisation services that have due regard for identitity and privacy sensitivities and regulations. Here, there are also major questions concerning trust: models and policies; the dynamics of trust; management frameworks and architectures; trusted authorities and roots; reputation models and management.

Non-technical issues concerned the management of working groups and joint projects: how to ensure continuity and maintenance of goals with possibilities for individuals or organisations to join and to leave without disruption. However, there seemed a keen desire and willingness to participate through existing or future mechanisms in place.

Priorities in the commercial area again included management of identities, stressing the critical need for user-centric approaches. A major concern is the part to be played by the ordinary users, how they can understand and best use available protection – and steer clear of avoidable dangers. One of the visiting company’s has carried out significant work on behalf of the real users and is studying the implications of the future internet and web based systems on real users needs and requirements for truly understanding privacy and identity aspects.

As a result of the visit, the INCO-TRUST team were invited as keynote speaker to the meeting of the Privacy Professionals Network, where they presented an outline of the research priority interests from the EU perspective on global privacy & security developments. Incidentally, the PPN is in the process of affiliating with the International Association of Privacy Professionals and the INCO-TRUST team were invited to join as core members.

Conclusions

A broad range of contacts was established with whom we can pursue future possibilities for collaborative research.

Interim conclusions about the areas and opportunities for joint research priorities may be summarised as:

• network technologies and systems, and the Future Internet
• privacy and identity issues - social, economic, and jurisdictional
• international test-beds

For more information, please contact the coordinator, Jim Clarke (jclarke at tssg dot org).