Project Coordinator (EU) :
Danaides/Sciences PO TolouseCountry of the EU Coordinator :
FranceOrganisation Type :
Non-profit OrganisationProject participants :
Team members Danaides (EU):
- Dr. Félix Blanc, co-founder at Danaides.org and Faculty Teacher at Sciences Po Toulouse. He has expertise in legal and ethical aspects of armed conflict, Internet technologies and digital rights. Role: Experiment Coordination Project Leader
- Delphine Frenoux, economist who worked for 10 years in the French Development Agency’s Group (AFD). Independent consultant. Role: Experiment 2 Project Leader.
- Stephanie Lamy, Danaides co-founder, founder of the NGO Global Relief Libya. She is currently writing a book on disinformation, while pursuing a PhD. Ms Lamy is an authority on disinformation campaigns and other deceptive collective actions. Role: Experiment 3 Project Leader.
- Candice Duprix, international consultant in the sector of international solidarity and temporary teacher for the Master Governance of International Relations at Sciences PO Toulouse. independent consultant supporting various organisations in the design and piloting of their emergency and development projects. Role: Operational deployment & traffic generation Project leader
- Adeline Demoncy, consultant specialised in strategy and development of international cooperation projects, she teaches at Science Po Toulouse. In 2015, she joined the French Agency for International Technical Expertise as Health Systems Strengthening Project Manager in Sub-Saharan Africa. Role: Operational deployment & traffic generation Project leader.
Team member Clemson University (USA)
- Pr. Richard Brooks, professor of computer engineering with Clemson University. His research concentrates on information assurance, battlespace coordination, behavior pattern extraction/detection and game theory. Role: Experiment 1 Project Leader
State of US partner :
South CarolinaStarting date :
Responsibility to protect population through peer governance and trusted community (P2PR2P)
Experiment description
Danaides, in partnership with Clemson University and Sciences Po Toulouse will develop the P2PR2P software, a secure common-pool-resource governance tool that manages user-driven requests and offers, dispatches knowledge, relationships, and other humanitarian aid or content. To develop the experiment two platforms will be used: GENI and FABRIC. Employees from Danaides and Sciences Po Tolouse will have access to both of them, by means of Camden University. On these platforms, two testbeds will be developed and data will be collected.
GENI allows to allocate slices of distributed resources: the generated traffic will flow between clients and to/from a FABRIC-deployed secret server. FABRIC, on its hand, offers an invasive network instrumentation, development and test environment. Its instrumentation tool will be used to to break the privacy of normally anonymized traffic.
Four topics will be impacted:
1. Data protection and ownership through privacy features: To link to a secret service, client-server communications use the Tor anonymization method, where all user communications are done via encrypted and cryptographically signed formats that are strictly checked. Setting up a system that routes Tor traffic through FABRIC's traffic analysis infrastructure is a first and it will help FABRIC experiment with advanced privacy enhancement infrastructure.
2. System accountability and impact evaluation through audit trail using DLT technology: Pr. Richard Brooks created a distributed ledger technology (DLT) for securing meta-data, offering the same level of protection as blockchain, but scaling more efficiently. In order to combat the data governance strategy, the experiment will try to incorporate bots into the framework that inject misleading entries into our distributed audit system.
3. P2P technologies foster trust and autonomy through gamification: The tools are designed to preserve security and privacy by default, so that users can communicate openly and anonymously inside the system. Although security and privacy are critical to human security in conflict and dynamic environments, achieving an optimal degree of collegiality in the governance of the common-pool-resources (CPR) required to carry out collective action presents a challenge. An internal incentive system has been built at the user level that rewards beneficial behavior with expanded control and scope of action within P2PR2P. Bot profiles will be created based on human characteristics: to generate rules-based traffic, these profiles will be made up of seven dimensions of trust-relevant attributes.
4. User-driven KPIs: As the P2PR2P community increases in size, a culture of best practices will emerge from user feedback, whose evolution will be aided by integrating performance indicators and impact evaluation into the audit system. Via (non)cooperation at the community and user levels, trust can be created, depleted, or eroded over time depending on shared objectives.
Implementation plan :
The experiment implementation will follow 10 steps:
- Task 1: On the FABRIC and GENI testbeds, set up Danaides P2PR2P secret operation. Using proxies, force traffic routing across FABRIC instrumented nodes.
- Task 2: Modify Android client software to accommodate new environments.
- Task 3: Create bots that mimic donors and requestors while maintaining security and confidence.
- Task 4: Deploy bots on testbeds.
- Task 5: Implement an audit trail and assess the effects.
- Task 6: P2PR2P server, nice requesters/donors, malicious requestors/donors, and intermediate nodes all collect traffic.
- Task 7: Security and anonymity analysis: Look for donor-requestor traffic meta-data (correlations.
- Task 8: Verify the audit trail: 1) Show the inappropriate practices that were reported in the audit trail.; 2) Tampering with audit trail either detectable or requires prohibitive amount of resources ; 3) Provide randomized controlled trials for effect assessment (RCT)
- Task 9: Data governance and trust analysis: Simulations using trust model to determine consequences of trust management alternatives.
- Task 10: Documentation.
Impacts :
- Impact 1: Improved EU-US cooperation on Next-Generation Internet, including policy cooperation.
- Impact 2: Collaboration and synergies between the Next Generation Internet and Tomorrow's Internet programs have been strengthened.
- Impact 3: Contributions to standards, creation of interoperable solutions and joint demonstrators.
- Impact 4: Top academics, hi-tech start-ups / SMEs, and Internet-related groups from the EU and the US collaborate on the evolution of the Internet.
Results :
Experiment 1: Check the security and privacy of the network links, as well as the integrity of audit trails.
The maximum entropy distribution is 1/n, which is the ideal probability of matching a session to a client. When it comes to mapping sessions to users, a complete loss of privacy results in a likelihood of one. The target value is a 1/n distribution for active sessions. It will also be seen how far it can deciphered audit trail entries and pinpoint the sources and destinations of user transactions. The system's undetected loss of user transactions is the target value.
Experiment 2: Implement an impact evaluation of P2PR2P.
It consists of assessing whether P2PR2P has achieved its intended goals. The objective is to measure the difference between the average outcome for the treatment group and the average outcome for the comparison group.
Experiment 3: Establish the quality of distributed governance strategies designed to maximize user trust within the system.
Two KPI will be monitored: the ability to commit fraud and the ability to delegate power across the user community. The ideal goal would be to maximize both to remove bottlenecks and empower the users.