Security & Privacy at PARC

Text source PARC website

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a subsidiary of Xerox Corporation, conducts pioneering interdisciplinary research in the physical, computational, and social sciences. Building on a 36-year tradition of innovation, PARC today provides research services, technology, and intellectual property to Xerox and other strategic partners.

One of the research areas is: Security & Privacy

PARC is developing technologies that intelligently support security and privacy for ubiquitous computing environments. Work in this area ranges from usable techniques for securely managing large networks of devices, to privacy-preserving methods for collecting and disseminating content over such networks.

This research area incorporates competencies in applied cryptography, human factors, and network security.

Project Areas

Usable Security
Today's users want mobile access to previously unknown devices and services as well as firewalled content. A fundamental challenge in providing such access securely is ease of use: if a security procedure is too difficult, users may configure it incorrectly, won't deploy it, or will just switch it off. PARC is developing technology that enables easy management of large networks of devices as well as usable access control for the content distributed on these networks. An example of a technology is the Network-in-a-Box.

Privacy-preserving Data Management
The trend toward ubiquitous computing has made the gathering and sharing of personal data increasingly easy. PARC is developing technologies that support such activities while providing strong privacy guarantees. One particular technology is a privacy appliance that protects against the identification of individuals through inference control.

Content Protection
With the growing demand for data-management outsourcing and the continued growth of content piracy, secure and efficient methods for protecting content are of increasing importance. One particular project in this space is developing semi-automated ways of protecting documents based on deep content analysis. This project is in collaboration with natural language processing and image analysis groups at PARC.