Projects

The project aims to define technical solutions to support the introduction of new mobile/ubiquitous services by addressing the related privacy issues. The central goal of Discreet is to minimize and control the amount of personalized information made available to the involved organizations, in order for the users to benefit of services without worrying about dissemination and improper use of their personal data. The project will develop a technical realization of a distributed unit of trust which protects and keeps the data required for the subsystems of a complex networked service separate using e.g. anonymization and encryption techniques. To make sure that only the absolutely necessary data will be provided to subsystems and subservices. Concepts will be developed to make users aware of the level of trust available, and by clearly and fairly informing users on purposes and features of processing of private data. The project explicitly includes law specialists to ensure, on one side, that the technical solutions proposed properly address and reflect the legal requirements, and on the other side to provide guidelines or establish best practices for the integration of technical concepts into regulation on data protection.

A Small or Medium-Scale Focused Research Project of ICT Call 1 FP7-ICT-2007-1. Grant Agreement no.: 214412.

TV services over the Internet can be provided either exploiting IP multicast functionalities or relying on a pure end-to-end (P2P) approach. The first technique unfortunately, will only work on a network infrastructure controlled by a single broadband operator due to limitations of IP multicast facilities. On the contrary, the P2P approach has been successfully exploited to overcome these limits and can potentially offer a scalable planetary infrastructure. Recently, several P2P-TV systems started to show up, with the last generation offering High Quality TV (P2P-HQTV) systems, providing a ubiquitous access to the service. These same potentialities of P2P-TV systems constitute a worry for network carriers since the traffic they generate may potentially grow without control, causing a degradation of quality of service perceived by Internet users or even the network collapse (and the consequent failure of the P2P-HQTV service itself!).

Starting from these considerations the NAPA-WINE project, funded by the European Commission within the seventh framework programme, aims at:

1. providing a careful analysis of the impact that a large deployment of both general P2P-TV and P2P-HQTV services may have on the Internet, through an in detailed characterization of the traffic they generate;
2. providing guidelines for P2P-TV developers regarding the design of systems that minimize the impact on the underlying transport network while optimizing the user perceived quality;
3. providing a road map for Internet Service Providers to better exploit the network bandwidth by showing simple and minimum cost actions that can be taken in presence of P2P-TV traffic.

The project addresses the study of peer-to-peer (P2P) communication systems, considering P2P as a novel communication paradigm that is changing the rules of the communication game in the Internet. P2P applications (Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, ...) became famous (or infamous!) thanks to file-sharing and the exchange of copyrighted information. However, the key point for the success of P2P networks are cooperation and resource sharing, which make the system scalable, highly performing, dependable, and resilient. Recent P2P systems like Bit-Torrent, Split-Stream, and Skype made it clear that P2P networking can address many other applications apart from file-sharing.

PROFILES is a two-year italian research project partially supported by MIUR under the PRIN (Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale) funding program 2007-2008.

When the software industry discusses about software integrity, the main focus is on the protection of static software modules (e.g., by verifying the signature of their originator). In contrast, dynamic software authentication in real-time during execution is a known problem without a satisfactory solution. Specifically, how to ensure that a trusted code base (i.e., the software as was specified and implemented) is running on an untrusted machine at all times and that the original code functionality has not been modified prior to or during run-time, is an open research challenge.

This project will investigate both all-in-software and hardware-assisted novel methodologies in order to solve the problem mentioned above by employing a trusted logic component on an untrusted machine that in turn authenticates its operation continuously during run-time. The method assures a remote entrusting component so that if the authentication is successful, then the original software functionality is properly executed on the untrusted machine.

SAFESPOT is an integrated research project co-funded by the European Commission Information Society Technologies among the initiatives of the 6th Framework Program.

The objective is to understand how intelligent vehicles and intelligent roads can cooperate to produce a breakthrough for road safety.

The aim is to prevent road accidents developing a Safety Margin Assistant that detects in advance potentially dangerous situations and that extends in space and time drivers' awareness of the surrounding environment.

The Safety Margin Assistant will be an Intelligent Cooperative System based on Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication.

The objective of the proposal is to define, develop and validate architectures and solutions for optimizing data transfer over wireless networks. Existing wireless networks (IEEE 802.11a/b/g, GPRS/UMTS, WiMAX) and next generation 4G wireless systems (3G LTE, Mobile WiMAX) will be considered.

The project is related to Italy-Japan Mobility Project (2008-2009).