Mission

Motivation

Protecting privacy and the empowerment of people to sovereignly handle their personal data are critical prerequisites for strengthening trust in the digital, data-driven economy. Studies show that there are significant concerns regarding cybersecurity and privacy among citizens. These concerns need to be addressed in order for people to embrace new technologies, especially in the key areas of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.

There is an opportunity for European companies to build sustainable customer trust in privacy-friendly products and services and to gain significant market shares in the long term by satisfying the needs security- and privacy-conscious customers. Trust is also a prerequisite for the exchange of data within the economy.

Privacy-preserving technologies can play an important role in addressing these challenges. At present, however, there is still a lack of maturity of such technologies that stands in the way of their widespread industrial use.

Goals and Approach

The goal of the Cloud-Ready Privacy-Preserving Technologies (CRYPTECS) project is to enhance privacy-preserving technologies and make them available collectively as a cloud platform. This platform will enable industrial application of privacy-preserving technologies.

The CRYPTECS cloud platform will amalgamate a wide range of technologies (e.g. Secure Multiparty Computation, Homomorphic Encryption and Differential Privacy) in the form of reusable cloud services. These services can be combined as needed to implement solutions with provable end-to-end guarantees regarding security and privacy.

The scientific and technological challenges lie in improving individual techniques as well as enabling the composition of different techniques, to enable the implementation of secure and efficient machine learning and data analytics services. Integration with cloud native technologies is required to enable the deployment of sensitive workloads at scale. The CRYPTECS cloud platform will be validated via the implementation of privacy-friendly applications from various domains including benchmarking in human resources, machine learning in automotive scenarios, and threat intelligence in IoT systems.

Innovations and Perspectives

The main innovation of the CRYPTECS project is an integrated cloud platform specifically designed to protect privacy. This will pave the way for seamless collaboration among companies in coopetive settings. Customers will be more likely to share their personal data with companies whose services and products are considered trustworthy. By enabling end-to-end data protection, the project will create impetus for the unhindered exchange of data in European science and business for the long-term benefit of the European societies.