Data Atoms for On-Demand Association and Access Control of Sensitive Data

Project description

This project focuses on building a “Data Atom”, a self-contained, secure digital package that holds sensitive data along with essential descriptive information for controlled discovery and access. The goal is to allow data to travel independently of traditional databases while preserving both privacy and context-awareness. A Data Atom contains two parts:

• Nucleus: the actual sensitive data (text, numbers, files, or multimedia).
• Wrapper: openly visible metadata describing the data’s context, purpose, and access rights, without revealing the sensitive content.

During the project time, you will develop a prototype that can:

• Accept raw input data from a defined real-world interaction scenario (such as a medical note, transaction record, or research observation).
• Extract relevant descriptive keywords and associate them with knowledge categories to create the nucleus (using natural language processing).
• Encrypt the nucleus using a hybrid encryption method.
• Build a wrapper containing metadata such as origin, knowledge category, and access rules.
• Store the resulting Data Atom in a document-oriented database for later retrieval.

By the end of the project, you will deliver a Data Atom generated from sample datasets, demonstrating how sensitive data can remain secure while still being searchable and shareable under context-based rules.

Assumed knowledge

Programming in Python Database Systems

Note: You need to register interest in projects from different supervisors (not a number of projects with the one supervisor).
You must also contact each supervisor directly to discuss both the project details and your suitability to undertake the project.