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Content archived on 2024-05-30

Personal Cryptography

Objective

"The amount of personal data stored in digital form has grown tremendously. All aspects of our lives are concerned. Our data include family pictures, insurance documents, bills and receipts, health records, cryptographic keys, electronic identities, certificates, and passwords. We store and process them on several personal devices as well as in the cloud via services such as Flickr or Facebook. Managing these data is challenging: they have to be updated, backed up, synchronised across devices, and shared. In case of emergency, health records must be accessible to doctors or designated family members. Many of these data are sensitive, but adequately protecting them is virtually impossible for private users with current tools.
Encrypting data makes managing them only harder. It destroys much of the functionality that users have come to expect such as synchronising and sharing; mismanagement of encryption keys might even render data illegible to the owner himself.

Our goal is to develop fundamentally new cryptographic primitives, protocols, and policy languages that let human users deal with cryptographic keys and encrypted personal data. We will invent mechanisms that 1) enable humans to securely store and retrieve cryptographic keys based on a single human-memorisable password, on biometrics, on hardware tokens; 2) enable end users to manage their various cryptographic keys and encrypted data via these keys; and 3) enable users and cloud hosts to perform useful operations on encrypted data without needing to decrypt. Our mechanisms will run on resource-constrained devices, i.e. they will be efficient and yet secure in the sense that they provide security guarantees, especially in the presence of untrusted cloud hosts.

Our basic cryptographic research aims at infusing growth of a research community around protection mechanisms for end-user keys and data and to initiate follow-up collaborative projects to deploy our theoretical results in the real world"

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

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Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

ERC-2012-ADG_20120216
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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-AG - ERC Advanced Grant

Host institution

IBM RESEARCH GMBH
EU contribution
€ 2 467 700,00
Address
SAEUMERSTRASSE 4
8803 RUESCHLIKON
Switzerland

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Region
Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera Nordwestschweiz Aargau
Activity type
Private for-profit entities (excluding Higher or Secondary Education Establishments)
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

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Beneficiaries (1)

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