Marco Casassa Mont

This R&D project aims at researching and addressing the problem of storage, integrity and survivability of digital evidence within an enterprise. The goal is to explore and provide storage functionalities underpinning an “Evidence Management Service”.

In the real world people and enterprises are accountable for their actions. As reputation is more and more a valuable asset, people and organizations retain documents and information for a long period of time as evidence of their behavior and actions. In today's world, documents are mainly available in a paper-based format and there are mechanisms and infrastructures to manage them as evidence. In a near future this could not be the case anymore because of the growing popularity of the Internet and the shift towards digital documents. Along with many advantages, this will introduce a set of problems, last and not least the management of digital evidence over a long period of time as it involves long-term management of data integrity, long-term confidentiality, long-term identity tracking and long-term storage management.

In this project  peer-to-peer architectural aspects are explored, to take advantage (in terms of storage and processing) of cheap and abundant resources (like PCs) available within medium and large enterprises. A hybrid peer-to-peer architecture is introduced, mitigated by the addition of a centralized trusted control component. The proposed system is adaptive to the behavior of the peers since it is responsive to the assessment of their trustworthiness and reliability.

Further information and details about this project and area of investigation can be found in the following HPL Technical Report:

• HPL-2001-133 Marco Casassa Mont, Lorenzo Tomasi, Rebecca Montanari - An Adaptive System Responsive to Trust Assessment based on Peer-to-Peer Evidence Replication and Storage - HPL-2001-133, 2001  [Presentation .ppt]