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Diogo Regateiro, a PhD student from IT in Aveiro, won the Best Paper Award at DATA 2017 – 6th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications, held in Madrid last July 24-26.

The paper entitled “SPDC: Secure Proxied Database Connectivity” presents an approach to heighten security when users connect to a given database to access sensitive information. “This approach involves removing the database credentials from the less secure client machine, the one that needs to access the database, and delegate this task to a more secure machine instead”, explains Diogo.

The author adds that “the information required to connect to the database is split between two different machines. Therefore, a hacker is required to breach both to obtain the credentials to the database and disclose the data stored within. Lastly, all of this is achieved while supporting the most pervasive tools used by developers to connect to databases”.

The wining paper was also co-authored by Óscar Mortágua Pereira and Rui Aguiar, both researchers from IT in Aveiro and the supervisors of Diogo Regateiro´s thesis.