The International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications, the so-called "Berlin Group", has published a working paper on cloud computing in the wake of its 51st meeting in Sopot (Poland) last week.

The "Sopot Memorandum" on privacy and data protection issues in cloud computing emphasizes that cloud computing must not lead to a lowering of data protection standards as compared to conventional data processing. The paper lists recommendations and gives guidance on best practices to enhance privacy and security in cloud environments. The group urges cloud providers to develop practices in order to offer greater transparency, security and accountability of their infrastructure and contractual clauses.

The Berlin Group strongly supports research activities like the TClouds project to push privacy by design technologies and legal guidance in order to achieve a higher level of trust in public clouds.

Download Sopot Memorandum here.

We are happy to announce that our results of the project's first year are now publicly available.

You can download all 12 deliverables here:

TClouds Deliverables

Please do not hesitate to give us feedback!

Matthias Schunter, the technical leader of TClouds, has  been invited to co-chair the Tracking Protection Working Group of the World-Wide Web Consortium.

The Tracking Protection Working Group is chartered to improve user privacy and user control by defining mechanisms for expressing user preferences around Web tracking and for blocking or allowing Web tracking elements. The group seeks to standardize the technology and meaning of Do Not Track, and of Tracking Selection Lists.

The kick-off meeting on September 21+22 in Boston MA, managed to assemble many important stakeholders. By allowing users to opt out of tracking, a substantial privacy concern in the cloud will be reduced.

Mid-October, the  yearly ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security (ACM CCS) will again be constitute a main event for the security community.

Researchers from TClouds have been very active contributors to this conference in the past and are continuing to provide strong contributions for 2011:

• Christian Cachin (IBM) co-chairs the Workshop on Cloud Security
• Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (TU Darmstadt) co-chairs the workshops on Digital Rights Management and Scaleable Trusted Computing
  
• Thomas Gross (IBM) co-chairs the workshop on Digital Identity Management

If you are attending the conference, feel free to contact our team members to learn more about TClouds. Some of the publications by TClouds members are:

A recent examination of over 1100 public VM images (AMIs) in Amazon's EC2 cloud by researcher of the System Security Lab at Technische Universität Darmstadt/CASED and Fraunhofer SIT Darmstadt has revealed that many users unintentionally publish private data with their AMIs. This data includes various cryptographic keys, passwords, or personally identifiable information and may lead to further crucial security threats for the publisher but also consumers of affected AMIs.

More information and technical details can be found at www.trust.cased.de/AMID.

Anyone interested in the security of cloud computing should consider the

2011 ACM Cloud Computing Security Workshop,

held in conjunction with the 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) on October 21, 2011, in Chicago.

The deadline for submission is July 1, 2011.

Mulitple people from TClouds are active in organization, including Matthias Schunter and Christian Cachin.

More info

 http://crypto.cs.stonybrook.edu/ccsw11/

Pick up a newspaper on any given day, and you’re likely to read about some sort of online security breach. Even with your data walled off in your own data center, you might have cause for consternation. But with the advent of cloud computing, and increasing amounts of sensitive data held and transported in clouds, these reports can become chilling.

That’s why IBM Research - in collaboration with Sirrix AG security technologies; the Portuguese energy and solution providers, Energias de Portugal and EFACEC; and San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, Italy - has undertaken an effort to create Trustworthy Clouds, or TClouds. As Dr. Christian Cachin, a cryptographer at IBM Research-Zurich, explains, TClouds are designed to address not only cloud-based security, but also cloud-related resilience.

Read more!

The European Commission is seeking to gather views on the cloud to help it build its own cloud computing strategy.

Interested parties are invited to contribute to the EC’s online public consultation, and have until 31 August 2011 to provide their input.

Read more!

The official TCLOUDS Blog is now online - feel free to write blogs and post comments.