Introduction

Abstract

The amount of data stored, processed, and exchanged by private companies and public organizations is rapidly increasing. As a consequence, users are today, with increasing frequency, resorting to service providers for disseminating and sharing resources they want to make available to others. The protection against privacy violations is becoming therefore one of the most important issues that must be addressed in such an open and collaborative context. In this book, we define a comprehensive approach for protecting sensitive information when it is stored on systems that are not under the data owner’s direct control. In the remainder of this chapter, we give the motivation and the outline of this book.