Policy-based control of applicative sessions

Telecom Bretagne (www.telecom-bretagne.eu) and the French Ministry of Defense Research Center (DGA / MI) currently conduct researches in the field of secure architectures to validate new concepts. The proposed PhD thesis funded by DGA / MI lies within this framework.

Description

Problematic
Military and civil information services include many Internet communication services (email, instant messaging, collaborative tools ...) to improve the exchange and distribution of information. The success of these tools, however, hides many shortcomings and limitations.
The traditional approach consists in compiling in a single policy often hardly configurable or customizable, a significant number of more or less sophisticated features that should ideally take into account all the requirements of these communications services. The inherent rigidity resulting from the monolithic character of these approaches is their main drawback resulting in some cases in an effective limitation when it has for example to manage contradictory requirements such as archiving and privacy.

Background and Objective
The new concept of Electronic Correspondence constitutes in this domain a significant improvement of traditional email. It allows to automatically derive for a specific use and a given context, a correspondence type encapsulating the exact set of policies to meet the requirements for this use and that particular context. It leads to the definition of an advanced messaging system that can dynamically exploit multiple policies matching the various and changing demands induced from an email to the next. We propose to analyze the extensions and applications capabilities of this approach to the Internet communication services used for information exchange and sharing.

Main steps
- state of the art concerning communication and interpersonal sharing of information and knowledge
- identification of significant use cases
- classification of applicative services (functional and non-functional requirements, protocols and architectures).
- state of the art about policy-based control models (description, negotiation, application ...)
- definition of a generic policy-based control model of applicative sessions (formalization, properties, ...)
- design and implementation of an architecture in which the model can be applied
- investigation of the use cases identifed above

Applicants profile
Master in security networking and computer science. Training in formal methods appreciated.
Before applying, the candidate has to verify the satisfaction of the funding requirements at the url below : www.ixarm.com/Allocations-de-these-financees

Contact
Applicants should send a full CV, the contact details of two referees and a cover letter to "sujet2015@mlistes.telecom-bretagne.eu"