Dan Bogdanov: Cybernetica supports Estonia's e-state and cyber security with new research projects

2022 has been a successful year for Cybernetica’s participation in the European Horizon research and development programme. Cybernetica's Information Security Institute is starting three new projects at the end of the year, all of which will contribute to the development of data-driven services and the creation of stronger cybersecurity and data protection technologies for public and private sector use.

The project called TEADAL (Trustworthy, Energy-Aware Federated Data Lakes Along the Computing Continuum) is investigating how to process data in the future that is shared between different users' mobile devices and different service providers' data centres. Data distributed in this way must be processed in a certain way in order not to be leaked to unauthorized parties. Data centres are increasingly large energy consumers, which is why the TEADAL project pays attention to the energy efficiency of data processing. TEADAL develops technologies and their selection methods and tests them in healthcare, agriculture, finance, industry, and environmental protection.

The project LAGO (Lessen Data Access and Governance Obstacles) brings together European justics and law enforcement agencies and researchers to find better solutions to use data in the fight against crime and terrorism. The project investigates how to ethically, safely, and legally share data (including personal data) for research, development of artificial intelligence models, and risk analysis, which would strengthen the security of European citizens.

Cybernetica's task in both projects is to research effective ways to create secure data-driven services, relying on the company's years of research and development in privacy protection technologies. "Today's X-road can offer the citizen a simple service behind which distributed databases are hidden. Our future is artificial intelligence and new data-driven services. We must learn to build new services in such a way that they protect distributed data and at the same time use energy sparingly," explained Dan Bogdanov, Chief Scientific Officer at Cybernetica.

In addition to data protection, the protection of the systems must also be ensured. Therefore, Cybernetica is honoured to cooperate with Czech and Estonian research partners in the new project CHESS (Cyber-security Excellence Hub in Estonia and South Moravia). CHESS explores future technologies for cybersecurity. For example, the study of post-quantum cryptography algorithms will help us ensure that the estate is ready if quantum computers manage to break our modern cryptography. "We learn to better analyse, test and certify cybersecurity solutions, therefore we are better able to choose technologies for the future ID card, mobile ID, Smart ID and also X-tee", comments senior researcher Liina Kamm.