Triumf: the Trusted Reliable Middleware Samcast: a Secure and Authenticated Multicast Protocol

If success of outsourcing and popularity of Web 2.0 are anything to go by, collaborations are highly desired both in business and social communities. From large scale organizations to teen-agers, every one seems to be interested in sharing her resources (be it computing power or data) with her peers provided it is beneficial to her personal goals. This collaboration process is supposed to be inherently trustworthy in order to be successful in attaining its intended goals. To take the success of this collaboration to maximum possible limits we need to guarantee that privacy and security of collaborating partners never get compromised. In my view, problem of privacy protection has to be dealt on three fronts. • Technical Approach: Novel technical solutions involving Cryptographic Secure Multiparty Computation Protocols, Statistical Data Analysis techniques, Intelligent User Interfaces and Social Network Analysis algorithms are required to provide an infrastructure upon which privacy preserving applications can be built. • Legislative Support: State and Federal Laws to force organizations to employ technical solutions to make sure that the privacy of their customers never get compromised. • Social Approach: Apart from technical and legislative support, people themselves need to be educated about the possible implications of the use of technology. Most of the users don’t understand the legal language behind privacy policies stated by the service providers. They need to be told in more user friendly ways as to how their privacy can get effected by the use of a specific service and how privacy leakage can be minimized. My research is aimed at making contributions to the technological advancements for privacy and security protection. I proposed a Middleware architecture[4], referred to as TRIUMF, that facilitates development of privacy preserving applications specially in context of distributed collaborations 1.