PST
Privacy, security and trust (PST) research teams at two Canadian institutions, the University of New Brunswick (UNB) and the National Research Council of Canada’s Institute for Information Technology (IIT), have been instrumental in establishing a much-needed community of practice in the field. They have brought together world experts via the now-annual PST Conference - an international forum for these experts to debate, discuss, examine and improve the current PST landscape within Canada and beyond.
The PST conference brings together researchers, practitioners and policy makers from industry, the public sector and academe to share ideas and research directions on this most timely of topics. Previously there was no framework for the research and development of online privacy, security and trust solutions while fostering knowledge expertise, increasing intellectual capital, and transforming research results into direct benefits for Canada. This coming together was needed to establish a forum for the exchange of information among the various PST experts and stakeholders in an area of research that is critical to Canada’s security and prosperity. The success of the PST conference illustrates the stakeholder buy-in to the idea that privacy, security and trust researchers need to interact on a regular basis in order to collectively come up with solutions. The ongoing impact of this series of conferences will be a safer and more secure information highway - and everyday world - for us and for our children.
“It is critical that we talk to one another about what’s going on in the area of Privacy, Security and Trust research and the role of the Internet in our everyday lives. The Internet is all-pervasive, and we have to find ways to make it safe and usable. This conference has helped us do that. It has brought together key players in the PST research field and provided a forum for us to join forces and find solutions. We need to work together, to complement one another, and to share strengths and ideas. We need to realize that the criminal element will always be one step ahead of us in finding ways to exploit new technology. We need to find and close these gaps. It is vital that we do everything possible to counter the efforts of those who would use the Internet to facilitate the sexual exploitation of children. Thanks to this conference, we have made progress.”
Detective Sergeant Paul Gillespie, Toronto Police Department, Keynote speaker at PST 2004 Conference.
PST 2004 was held in Fredericton in October 2004. It followed on from the successful national PST workshop in Montréal in October 2003 (the first event to draw together experts in the field from across the Canada) and a CANARIE sponsored security workshop hosted at UNB in May, 2003. The Montreal workshop was part of the national “From e-Commerce to e-Economy” series; PST is crucial to the development of Canada’s e-Economy.
A further objective of PST research is identifying and connecting all PST researchers coast to coast and developing highly-qualified PST knowledgeable personnel to augment the Canadian workforce as researchers and IT professionals. To this end, the PST Research Group has been instrumental in developing PhD candidates in specific areas of PST research.
PST research has become critically important to society in general and to information technology in particular. Privacy legislation such as PIPEDA, the anti-SPAM task force, and discussions of biometrics and national identity cards, coupled with ever-expanding cyber security threats, have served to heighten the awareness of PST.
NRC IIT and UNB have been involved in organizing the PST conference from its inception. Hosting the PST conference in New Brunswick is important to the NRC IIT research agenda and to cluster building activities in the region. UNB is involved with PST for many of these same reasons. Previous PST conferences were held in:
- 2003 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
- 2004 Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
- 2005 St. Andrews by the Sea, New Brunswick, Canada
- 2006 Markham (Toronto) , Ontario, Canada
- 2007 Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada (IFIPTM 2007)
iTrust and IFIP
European research activities are structured around consecutive four-year programmes, or so-called Framework Programmes. The Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) sets out the priorities - including the Information Society Technologies (IST) priority. iTrust was founded in 2003 with the following goals:
- To facilitate the cross-disciplinary investigation of fundamental issues underpinning computational trust models by bringing together expertise from technology oriented sciences, law, philosophy and social sciences.
- To facilitate the emergence of widely acceptable trust management processes for dynamic open systems and applications.
- To facilitate the development of new paradigms in the area of dynamic open systems which effectively utilize computational trust models.
- To facilitate the integration of new trust management paradigms and emerging architectures for Grid computing and Virtual Organizations.
- To help the incorporation of trust management elements in existing standards.
- In 2007 PST2007 and iTrust 2007 were held jointly as part of IFIPTM 2007 in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. Previous iTrust conferences were held in:
- 2003 Crete, Greece
- 2004 St. Anne's College, Oxford, UK
- 2005 Rocquencourt, France
- 2006 Pisa, Italy
- 2007 Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada (IFIPTM 2007)
iTrust is now self funding and has become affiliated with IFIP as has PST. PST2008 will be an official IFIP WG 11.11 (Trust Management) event under technical committee #11 (TC11 - Security and Protection in Information Processing Systems).
2007
IFIPTM 2007 was attended by 108 individuals (including 15 students) from 16 countries. The conference was chaired by John McHugh, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada and William Winsborough, University of Texas at San Antonio. The program committee chaired by Sandro Etalle, University of Twente, The Netherlands, and Stephen Marsh, NRC Canada, Institute for Information Technology selected 25 full papers from the 76 submitted (33% acceptance rate) as well as 4 short papers. The proceedings were published by Springer (ISBN 978-0-387-73654-9).
2008
IFIPTM2008 will be held in Trondheim, Norway, June 18-20, 2008. PST2008 will be held in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, October 1-3, 2008.
