Estonia is widely recognised as having one of the world’s most advanced digital governments, with much written on the subject by the World Bank, Forbes, the Financial Times, and more. Two steps were taken that facilitated and led to the rise of the digital identity in Estonia; first, a personal identification number known as the “Isikukood” was assigned to every citizen and resident of Estonia, and second, 10-year passports were issued.
Cybernetica’s Data Exchange Technologies team is pleased to announce that at the end of last year, UXP Directory 2.0 (formerly known as UXP Service Directory) was released. The product was renamed, because the focus has been shifted from services to the whole UXP installation. The aim is to provide a valuable overview of all its members, information systems, and services.
The CyberSec4Europe cybersecurity competence centre
On February 1st, 2020, the cybersecurity competence centre pilot project CyberSec4Europe of the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme will have been in progress for a year. The CyberSec4Europe consortium has been very active in gathering details about partner competences, mapping the existing assets and planning future research. The first demonstrators for the seven verticals (e-commerce, supply chain security assurance, privacy-preserving identity management, incident reporting, maritime transport, medical data exchange, smart cities) will be set up by the end of April 2020.
Self-sovereignty with respect to digital identity, and the desire for individuals to have genuine control over their data is a very interesting subject. In my eyes, this is a monumental challenge, one that I fear isn’t even realistic at the moment, though that shouldn’t stop anyone from trying. Part of me sees it as idealistic; something that would be great to have, but might never be achievable due to laws and regulations requiring certain ways of working in order to protect those involved. I also find, that depending on who I speak to, there are different beliefs and guiding principles surround self-sovereignty, some stricter than others, and I find it will likely be a case, that we will never be able to please all of the people, all of the time.
We have taken you on a magical journey through the world of cryptography. This is our final piece, where we’ll focus on the elliptic curve cryptography in detail. We’ll also have a look at what the future holds for us.
Without further ado, let’s continue where we left off in our previous post.
In this post, the focus is on elliptic curves. We’ll talk about commutative groups, operations on the points of an elliptic curve, intersection and tangent methods, neutral and opposite elements, and much more.
More and more we find that it’s not just technology that gets us where we need to be, but how we use that technology and the enabling factors surrounding it.
This post focuses on cryptography in groups. We will talk more about how to securely exchange information over public channels, and how to ensure security in the key exchange protocol. We will also take a look at which mathematical issues we face and which methods to use for solving them.
The development of the ETCB information system started in the nineties. The systems still contain important parts that were developed back then and are based on the 20 year old technology. Over the years, the system has grown in an evolutionary way – there is more than one hundred different sub-systems supporting various business processes. Those systems have been built over the course of last 20 years, using different technologies, following different user interface guidelines and designs and different philosophies. The situation was complicated further by the merger of Estonian Tax Board and Estonian Customs Board in mid-2000 when their technologically disparate systems were also merged. The system was really heterogeneous in many ways, but at the same time contained big monolithic blocks of critical functionality that were implemented on the decades-old technology.