Privacy-Preserving Computation In The Cloud
While reaping financial benefits of cloud computing, organizations hand their data to external parties, cloud service providers, for processing and storage. Instead of losing control in this process, organizations need to meet strict internal and statutory regulations.
The Seventh Framework Programme PRACTICE will mitigate insider threats and stop data leakage for computations in the cloud while maintaining economies of scale.
Creating a secure cloud framework using cryptographic technologies will provide better security and privacy guarantees for all parties in cloud-computing scenarios. Team of Top European experts
The PRACTICE consortium consists of key European experts working towards providing privacy and confidentiality for computations in the cloud. The team includes leading industrial and research companies and respected European universities. The consortium’s reach covers 11 countries and 18 organizations and the full chain from research to end-user service providers in the cloud.
Goals of the PRACTICE project are:
- getting provable guarantees from cloud providers for data confidentiality and integrity;
- computation on encrypted data, preventing even insiders from disclosing secrets or disrupting the service;
- flexible architecture and tools allowing seamless migration to new cloud platforms while gradually adding levels of protection.
Key technologies
The team is well posed to cover the promising fundamental technologies that help to achieve the set goals. In PRACTICE the team will investigate
- Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC),
- Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE),
- Domain-Specific Development Tools, and the application of
- Formal Methods to verify relevant properties of resulting systems.
Role of Cybernetica
Cybernetica contributes to PRACTICE our unique expertise in developing tools and applications using secure multiparty computation.
The Sharemind® framework makes secure multiparty computation attainable to developers who are not expert cryptographers. To speed up market adoption, Cybernetica will share our experience of building real-world cloud solutions on Sharemind® with the PRACTICE consortium.
In PRACTICE we will also enhance the developed framework and simplify building services based on secure multiparty computation. We expect that simpler and widely accessible solutions with strong security and privacy guarantees will grow the number of European cloud providers offering them.
Or team will concentrate on building tools for software developers and cloud service providers, so that a wide range of companies would be able to build secure cloud services without Cybernetica’s direct involvement.
Project was funded under the European Union Seventh Framework Programme. Project reference: 609611