TC: Small: Distributed Privacy-Preserving Policy Reconciliation

In order to enable collaboration between different parties it is necessary that the partners reach an agreement on the policy rules that will govern their interaction. While state-of-the-art mechanisms will allow the parties to reconcile their polices, today's policy reconciliation protocols have two main shortcomings. First, they violate privacy since at least one of the parties is required to discloses all its information during the reconciliation process. Second, they generally lack fairness, i.e., the parties' preferences are not recognized. This research is geared to develop novel techniques that enable both private and fair policy reconciliation. The benefits of this research go far beyond the field of policy reconciliation itself. In fact, policy reconciliation is expected to play an increasingly important role in managing and securing infrastructures and procedures, ranging from day-to-day activities such as scheduling an appointment online, to enhancing interoperation in today's cell phone infrastructure, to the architecture of the Future Internet.