The application of data analysis techniques over large data collections provides great benefits, from the personal, to the business, research, and social domain. The availability of large data collections recording actions and choices of individuals and organisations can lead to great improvement in the understanding of how the world operates. The continuous evolution of ICT is enabling the realisation of such vision at a fast pace, supporting the realisation of architectures enabling collaborative data sharing and analytics. A clear obstacle towards the realisation of such potential and vision is represented by security and privacy concerns. Indeed, the (actual or perceived) loss of control over data and potential compromise of their confidentiality can have a strong detrimental impact on the realisation of an open framework for enabling the sharing of data from multiple independent data owners. The goal of MOSAICrOWN is to enable data sharing and collaborative analytics in multi-owner scenarios in a privacy-preserving way, ensuring proper protection of private/sensitive/confidential information. MOSAICrOWN will provide effective and deployable solutions allowing data owners to maintain control on the data sharing process, enabling selective and sanitised disclosure providing for efficient and scalable privacy-aware collaborative computations. MOSAICrOWN Consortium sees the participation of major industry players, providing strategic use cases with strong exploitation and impact, and of an SME supporting deployment and standardisation.

SAFEcrypto will provide a new generation of practical, robust and physically secure post quantum cryptographic solutions that ensure long-term security for future ICT systems, services and applications. Novel public-key cryptographic schemes (digital signatures, authentication, public-key encryption, identity-based encryption) will be developed using lattice problems as the source of computational hardness. The project will involve algorithmic and design optimisations, and implementations of the lattice-based cryptographic schemes addressing the cost, energy consumption, performance and physical robustness needs of resource-constrained applications, such as mobile, battery-operated devices, and of real-time applications such as network security, satellite communications and cloud. Currently a significant threat to cryptographic applications is that the devices on which they are implemented on leak information, which can be used to mount attacks to recover secret information. In SAFEcrypto the first analysis and development of physical-attack resistant methodologies for lattice-based cryptographic implementations will be undertaken. Effective models for the management, storage and distribution of the keys utilised in the proposed schemes (key sizes may be in the order of kilobytes or megabytes) will also be provided. This project will deliver proof-of-concept demonstrators of the novel lattice-based public-key cryptographic schemes for three practical real-word case studies with real-time performance and low power consumption requirements. In comparison to current state-of-the-art implementations of conventional public-key cryptosystems (RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC)), SAFEcrypto’s objective is to achieve a range of lattice-based architectures that provide comparable area costs, a 10-fold speed-up in throughput for real-time application scenarios, and a 5-fold reduction in energy consumption for low-power and embedded and mobile applications.

Cloud computing is increasingly a necessary strategical ICT infrastructure component for European companies to successfully compete in the world-wide economy. The advantages of renting ICT infrastructures, platforms, and services, with easy access to scalability and elasticity, are driving an ever accelerating transfer toward the cloud of data and applications. Unfortunately, such a convenience comes at the price of the data owners losing control over their own data and any consequent misuse or security threats on them, which often limit the owner's adoption of the cloud's potential capabilities. On one hand, cloud providers can be assumed to employ basic security mechanisms for protecting data in storage, processing, and communication, devoting resources to ensure security that many medium and small companies may not be able to afford. On the other hand, data owners, when relying on the cloud, lose control over data and their processing, hence leaving them potentially exposed. Today data owners have to choose between having security but limited functionality or fully enjoying functionality but compromising on security and privacy guarantees. This situation has a strong detrimental impact on the adoption and acceptability of cloud services. Data owners may refrain from relying on the cloud for certain data, which they consider more sensitive or critical, or they use the cloud but remain exposed to the consequences of improper protection and control. The goal of ESCUDO is to empower data owners as first class citizens of the cloud. ESCUDO provides effective and deployable solutions allowing data owners to maintain control over their data when relying on Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) for data storage, processing, and management, without sacrificing on functionality. ESCUDO consortium sees the participation of major industry players in the cloud area, and of an innovative SME, contributing real-world use cases, and providing strong exploitation and impact.