Cloud ReadY Privacy Preserving TEChnologieS – CRYPTECS

The mission of the CRYPTECS project is to make privacy-preserving computing (PPC) technology readily available for industrial use by leveraging the broad expertise of a strong transnational Franco-German consortium.

Our main innovation will be an open source cloud platform that promotes the adoption of PPC technology by offering a broad spectrum of business-ready PPC techniques (Secure Multiparty Computation, Homomorphic Encryption, Trusted Execution Environments, and methods of Statistical Disclosure Control) as reusable and composable services. The CRYPTECS solution will implement efficient techniques with comprehensive and provable end-to-end security and privacy guarantees.

The main scientific challenges addressed in the CRYPTECS project are the elimination of shortcomings of individual PPC techniques, like performance of MPC and FHE or limited utility for DP, the removal of barriers to the integration of different PPC techniques into secure and privacy-preserving machine learning and data analytics services, and the fusion of PPC techniques and cloud native technology to address prerequisites for production use in an industrial context, like scalability.

The CRYPTECS consortium, consisting of renowned scientific institutes, multinational companies, and innovative SMBs from both France and Germany, covers the expertise for today's most important PPC techniques and allows us to tackle challenges along the entire innovation chain, from basic research and industrial implementation to field trials with real customers in the IoT and the automotive domain. This breadth allows us to systematically investigate not only individual techniques in isolation but also the interactions between them at all relevant levels. This integrated approach requires intensive cooperation, which is supported by regular face-to-face meetings and the exchange of researchers between partners from Germany and France.

We expect that CRYPTECS will have a lasting impact on the successful development and deployment of PPC technologies in Europe, so that privacy protection will be an enabler rather than an obstacle to new innovative applications. For European companies, this is an opportunity to improve their services and to conquer market shares with privacy-friendly GDPR-compliant products. By making PPC techniques suitable for large-scale industrial use, CRYPTECS will help to pave the way for a future in which empowered customers will be able to share their personal data for processing with companies that have earned trust through the use of state-of-the-art privacy-friendly technology. People's concerns about emerging technologies such as Autonomous Driving, Industry 4.0 and Big Data can be alleviated and their development can become a European success story. Obviously, this will have a beneficial impact on the lives of European citizens and societies as a whole.