“The project is part of a wider effort by Eurostat to innovate the way official statistics are developed and produced.”
The European statistics authority Eurostat has selected Cybernetica to build a multi-party secure private Computing-as-a-Service platform for processing confidential data across organisations and countries.
The project JOCONDE (Joint On-demand COmputation with No Data Exchange) will foster the adoption of privacy enhancing technologies (PET) in the European Statistical System (ESS). The project will contribute to sparking innovation as statistical authorities around the world work on bringing new data sources into use. For statistical institutions like Eurostat, the adoption of PETs is a means to maintain the highest levels of data protection and confidentiality when the statistical processes extend towards new, more granular data sources.
Cybernetica's contribution to the JOCONDE project builds on years of research and development in security and privacy technologies that had already resulted in the Sharemind product line. Cybernetica was selected by Eurostat based on a competitive open call for tenders. This is yet another acknowledgement of the prominent position of Cybernetica in this exciting and rapidly growing business sector.
"We will provide everyone collaborating on data across organisations or borders with technology that lets them keep control over how their data is used and protect their confidentiality. We bring our experience from developing the Sharemind MPC system and are going to build an interoperable platform for using cryptographically secure computing on clouds and data centers," explained Dan Bogdanov, Chief Scientific Officer for Cybernetica.
Fabio Ricciato, project manager at Eurostat, explained that the project is part of a wider effort by Eurostat to innovate the way official statistics are developed and produced. "Providing citizens, businesses, policymakers and the whole society with more, better, richer and timelier statistics requires extending the set of data used for statistical production beyond traditional sources and increases the need to integrate data held by different organisations into the final statistical products. This is a positive development, that benefits prospectively the whole society, but at the same time it poses new challenges in terms of confidentiality and data protection," he continued. Fortunately, according to Ricciato, the new scenario brings also new instruments to address these challenges: advanced PET-based solutions offer today alternatives to plain data sharing, so that the proliferation of data cooperations among statistical institutions and data holders will not result in the proliferation of confidentiality risks.
The JOCONDE project was successfully kicked off in April 2024 for a planned duration of two years. It will build a detailed set of system specification and a practical prototype implementation to test the system concept.