On-Going Research Projects

AMORES ANR Project

The AMORES project is funded by the Agence Nationale pour la Recherche , the CNRS, the INRIA, LAAS, Supélec.
The ubiquitous world in which we live is characterized by a high mobility of individuals, most of them wearing devices capable of geo-localization (smartphones or GPS-equipped cars). However, most of the current transportation systems have not yet really used the facilities offered by these geo-located devices to improve the mobility of their users or to propose new transportation means.
Situated in this mobiquitous context, the AMORES project is built around three use-cases related to mobility, namely (1) dynamic carpooling, (2) real-time computation of multi-modal transportation itineraries and (3) mobile social networking. For these three use cases, the main objective of the AMORES project is to define and develop geo-communication primitives at the middleware level that can offer the required geo-located services, while at the same time preserving the privacy of users, in particular with respect to their location (notion of geo-privacy).
The geo-primitives refer to the set of services used for data exchange between applications, which are aware of their location and can explicitly use the geographical context in their operation. Within the AMORES project, we will focus on the study geo-located services such as geo-casting, geo-registers, geo-queries and geo-computing. Moreover, in order to guarantee the authenticity of the location information, we will study techniques that can be used to verify the position claimed by the entities. In order to offer privacy guarantees, we will propose an anonymization method based on location data that we coin as locanyms.
To offer such features, the geo-primitives require some basic components, such as routing, cryptographic functions, as for distributing and managing cryptographic keys and the recognition of the location. Thus, privacy has also to be tackled at the level of these basic components in order to control the digital traces generated by their uses. For example, routing allows by construction to "track" the movements of a device if it always keep the same identifier (IP or MAC address). Within the AMORES project, we want to study the problem of anonymous routing and key generation by taking explicitly geo-awareness into account.
Each of these services can only work through cooperation of the different entities composing the mobile network. Therefore, we wish to develop mechanisms encouraging entities to cooperate together in a privacy-preserving manner, but also to provide services that can detect entities that deliberately give fake information or that display a malicious behaviour. The envisioned approach consists in the definition of generic primitives such as the management of trust and the incentive to cooperation, jointly with specialized instances of mechanisms for observing the behaviour of nodes.
For each of the use cases previously mentioned, we will develop a prototype built out of the primitives developed at the middleware level. Thus, in order to prove the applicability of our approach, we plan to implement the computation in real-time of multimodal itineraries and mobile social networking, at least in the form of a proof-of-concept, and to distribute the underlying middleware as open-source. With respect to the third use case, i.e., dynamic carpooling, it will be integrated by one of the partners within its line of product. Another important contribution of this project will be to demonstrate and encircle the real possibilities offered by the proposed approach as well as its limits. Generalizing the expected results on the Toulouse area in collaboration with Tisséo, will nourish thoughts about the future of urban transport systems and the practical applicability of such an approach.
To summarize, the outputs of the project are both conceptual and practical: innovative privacy- preserving geo-communication primitives for mobiquitous systems, along with a middleware and some prototypes and, finally, an impact on next generation public transportation.

Past Research Projects

Contract DGA PEA Exploratory Study Program: Security of the ad hoc routing protocols in the context of future tactical military networks

One of the objectives of future tactical networks is to allow non-hierarchical communi- cations between FIST (Future Integrated Soldier Technology) troopers. In this context, ad hoc networks are a candidate of choice : they allow non-hierarchical routing, but also automatically handles the mobility of entities taking part to the network while enabling a fast and simple deployment. Hence, the goal of this contract it to study security of the ad hoc routing protocols in the context of future tactical military networks.
We first specified the global architecture of the future military tactical networks so as to identify the various use cases of ad hoc networks in this context. Then, we made a state of the art of the various ad hoc routing protocols, so as to define what protocols suit the best the various contexts of the future military tactical networks. We also studied the attacks that exist against the ad hoc routing protocols, and proposed attack scenarios in the context of future military tactical networks. We now are studying the security mechanisms that could be deployed to protect against these attacks. The main idea is to combine cryptographic solutions to protect against identity theft, and misbehavior detection solutions to prevent entities from sending deliberately false routing information.
In the last phase of the study, we will develop a proof-of-concept demonstrating the utility of combining these two approaches to protect against attacks previously identified.