XLAB Research department has participated in more than 80 research projects, and another one has reached the finish line. Together with 9 project partners, we have embarked on a challenging three-year journey towards improved personal data sharing. With our extensive experience in functional encryption and cryptography, we have helped build a platform that enables the processing of sensitive personal data while maintaining the highest levels of privacy and security.
The KRAKEN platform: Returning personal data back to users
The main focus of the KRAKEN project was to develop a highly trusted and secure, yet scalable and efficient platform for personal data using state-of-the-art privacy aware analytics methods. The project has introduced an unprecedented approach that provides an alternative to mainstream paradigms while fully granting the privacy and self-sovereignty of data subject, enabling advanced, convenient control of data sharing based on innovative end-to-end encryption.
KRAKEN addressed sharing, brokerage and trading of the potentially sensitive personal data, by returning the control of this data to citizens (data providers) throughout the entire data lifecycle. Read more about the project here.
Improving the exchange of sensitive data between parties
XLAB’s role in the project was to participate in designing and implementation of cryptographic protocols that enable a data market to exchange and process data products. The technologies used enabled the KRAKEN marketplace to act as an intermediate between data providers and data buyers without having any access to data itself. This is an important advance over the approach many web platforms take nowadays, harnessing and using user’s private data for their own benefit.
XLAB has helped build a platform based on the multi-party computation paradigm that allows what intuitively might seem impossible – (decentralized) processing of sensitive and private data without having access to it.
Great collaboration produces great results
“We are happy that we were able to participate in the project and contribute to the development of privacy-preserving functionalities, especially given the importance of security and privacy in the modern world. We have gained important insights into state-of-the-art cryptographic tools, such as multi-party computation, which we believe will become increasingly common in the near future,” explains XLAB project manager Tilen Marc.
We have also learned many practical aspects of deploying a complex decentralized system, such as the KRAKEN marketplace, among cross-Europe partners. This has only been possible through the wonderful cooperation from KRAKEN project partners, ranging from academic institutions to business partners: Atos, InfoCert S.p.A., Austrian Institute of Technology, Graz University of Technology, KU Leuven Centre for Information Technology and Intellectual Property, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Lynkeus srl, Technology Exploration and Stiftung Secure Information and Communication Technologies (SIC).
It was a pleasure collaborating with you and we hope to work together on other interesting projects in the future!
