IPCRESS: IP protecting cloud services in supply chains

The IPCRESS project addresses key industry barriers to Cloud adoption related to data security and resilience, focused in particular on the difficulties of entrusting highly valuable Intellectual Property (IP) to third parties through the Cloud.

We address concerns about IP leakage and IP theft: IP theft has been cited as a £9.2bn problem for UK industry (OCSIA and Detica, 2011) and described as greatly assisted by an 'insider'. But an 'insider' is hard to define in the deperimeterisation of Cloud and supply chains.

IPCRESS will develop a capability for tracking IP through supply chains, offering Cloud services to:

• Prevent IP leakage
• Detect IP leakage, or theft
• Identify retention beyond allowed periods.

The approach to be developed and embedded within Jaguar Land Rover is based on a computationally efficient method for finding IP without exposing IP, referred to as private search, but with an additional novelty (US patent filed by the University of Surrey) of avoiding costs of encryption.