Seed4C

TSI-020401-2012-10 project co-funded by the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Tourism within the National Plan for Scientific Research, Development and Technological Innovation.

Project Overview

Project SEED4C (Secured Embedded Element and Data Privacy for Cloud) responds to the European strategy of promoting the development of cloud computing. There is a clear European interest in competing with American organizations, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, or Yahoo in the cloud market and, along this line, there is a great opportunity in the security area within this environment. Companies worldwide are hesitant to leverage on this technology, without greater or better security guarantees. To overcome this problem area, the European strategy for the development of cloud computing -brought forth at the Davos Economic Forum- aimed at promoting efficient data protection without conflicting with the single European market. In response to the current European context, project SEED4C will contribute the foundations for the definition and deployment of secure platforms in the cloud. For this purpose, SEED4C’s Consortium comprises a total of 18 companies from four different countries, Finland, France, Korea and Spain, operating on a €10,000,000 budget.

Objectives

The intent of the project is to change the concept of Security in the Cloud to Cloud Security where isolated security points are all interconnected; to achieve this, coordinated security points of enforcement are proposed under the concept of a Network of Secure Elements (NoSEs). NoSEs are made of secure elements (SE) attached to computers, users or network appliances provisioned with secret keys. They can establish security associations, communicate together to setup trusted networks and propagate security conditions centrally defined to a group of machines. The project’s main objective is to study the impact of NoSEs upon the different layers of the architecture, from hardware to service in order to define how the trust can be propagated from the lower layers to the upper ones.

Project Consortium