Secure Content Management In Ambient Environments- how about(3)

In order to strengthen the research on security and ambient intelligence, as well as the relationship between the content management and security work at Philips Research and at Twente University, a joint research project is set up. The work will be carrie

Fig. 1. A Controlled Content Access Architecture

The aim is to provide targeted audio/video content, based on matching meta-data againstuser profiles and the context, which include access permission descriptions. Specificquestions to be addressed are: How do meta-data processing and access control interact in this architecture? What security classification would make sense to describe meta-data and userprofiles from the viewpoints of the content provider and the user? Are theseviewpoints conflicting? How can the system be organized such that personalization information, althoughexploited by the access control is never leaked back to the service provider? Can the system be so flexible that the meta-data itself can be personalized? How can we implement and evaluate the architecture of the system?

Secure Meta-Data ProcessingThis research will address the question of how to handle secure meta-data. The focus willbe on techniques for manipulating secure meta-data. Meta-data is used for variouspurposes, such as search, indexing, personalization, etc. Since the meta-data is growing,the pressure to secure it will grow. Nevertheless securing the meta-data should not hinderits processing for various applications. Compare, for example, the problem of trick-playon encrypted video. The research should focus on finding meta-data security techniquesthat on the one hand satisfy the security requirements on meta-data, and at the same timeallow efficient operations on meta-data for the above purposes. Since most meta-data isrepresented using XML, XML modeling and security technology (XML encryption) willplay an important role.

As a starting point the process described in Figure 2 will be taken. Here a query isexecuted against a collection of encrypted XML documents that contain meta-data,profile, or context descriptions. In order to avoid decryption of the whole collection