Technical Report Description

The Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector is present in almost every aspect of society. It is strongly supporting the development of other sectors and allowing the creation of new business models contributing to the transition of the traditional economy to a digital one. Services, products and processes are being digitalized offering advanced capabilities and flexible solutions in a smart way reducing overall costs and environmental impacts. New Smart ICT platforms and technologies like Cloud Computing, Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence and advanced analytic contribute to this digitalization. However, the wide spread adoption of such Smart ICT platforms and technologies have resulted in a situation where the amount and variety of data that are being generated and processed are higher than ever before.

The value of data is huge, but capturing this value is complex. Data can contain personal identification information that directly concerns and compromises the private lives of individuals. Therefore, protecting this data is critical, and it is essential to ensure a high level of security and privacy in order to support the wide acceptance for, and trust in, Smart ICT. The data economy brings increasing opportunities for innovation and growth, and at the same time, many challenges and issues are open.

Researchers, as well as Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) are actively working on the development of techniques and good practices to tackle a part of these challenges and improve the trustworthiness of Smart ICT. However, gaps exist between scientific developments and technical standardization. For the benefit of society and economy, it appears essential to better link these works, which will allow, on one hand, for the research domain to take into account the last developments of the common technical language (technical standardization), and on the other hand to guarantee the integration of the latest knowledge (to disseminate valuable research results) into standards.

These technical reports provides gap analyses between research and technical standardization in three Smart ICT domains, namely Cloud Computing, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data mainly on Data Privacy and Protection. This work extends the White Paper “Data Protection and Privacy in Smart ICT” published in October 2018 and provides new results of the common research program “Technical Standardization for Trusted Use in the Field of Smart ICT” between ILNAS and the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of the University of Luxembourg.

The first report focuses on Cloud Computing. It introduces state-of-the-art scientific developments and current standardization activities. In that context, it provides first an overview of recent scientific research directions on data protection and privacy in order to explore the needs from a researcher’s perspective. After that, it gives a general overview of standardization efforts. Security and privacy controls in cloud, inherent properties of cloud, data storage and processing in the cloud, metering, billing and pricing aspects are the benchmarks used to carry out the gap analysis. The outcome of this study is to offer new insights and make contributions to narrow the gaps for future research and technical standardization efforts.

The second report deals with Internet of Things (IoT). The goal of this study is to first introduce the concept of trustworthiness in IoT with its main pillars, data protection, privacy and security, and then analyze developments in research and standardization for each of these. The study presents a gap analysis on data protection, privacy and security between research and standardization, throughout which the use case of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is referred to, as a promising value-added service example of mobile IoT devices. The study concludes with suggestions for future research and standardization in order to address the identified gaps.

The third report concerns Artificial Intelligence. The main contributions of this study are threefold: 1) It provides a survey and analysis on data protection, privacy, and trustworthiness challenges of AI and Big Data based on the state-of-the-art research. 2) It presents a survey of standardization and the activities of SDOs for the data protection, privacy, and trustworthiness of AI. 3) It carries out a gap analysis considering both perspectives to identify and highlight the gaps such that business sectors, industries, and governments can adopt secure, and trustworthy AI.