Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TANGO (Digital Technologies ActiNg as a Gatekeeper to information and data flOws)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-02-29
In this context, TANGO aims at establishing a stronger data sharing platform in a citizen-centric, secure and trustworthy manner, by developing innovative solutions while addressing environmental degradation and climate change challenges. The main objectives of TANGO are the following:
1. Design and develop a holistic, flexible and open framework for fair, responsible and green data management, sharing and storage while maintaining data ownership based on energy-efficient Smart Contracts, Artificial Intelligence, Self-Sovereign Identity, Self-Encryption and Continuous Behavioural Authentication.
2. Provide a secure, trusted and audible data management, storage and sharing environment by developing advanced, energy-efficient Blockchain services and specifying novel security and privacy-preserving protocols for guaranteeing the ownership of the data throughout the whole data lifecycle.
3. Design and implement distributed trust management mechanisms that leverage Self-Sovereign Identity for identity management, innovative user and device onboarding approaches, user and device continuous behavioural authentication mechanisms, and hardening of side-channel attacks, providing highly secure and user-friendly access control.
4. Exploit the power of Artificial Intelligence in order to produce accurate decision making targeting the data, security and infrastructure management towards “green” data operations.
5. To validate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution in six (6) diverse use cases with the active engagement and training of several different stakeholders’ groups accomplishing at the end of the project a TRL-6 level for the entire TANGO platform.
6. Ensure wide communication and scientific dissemination of the innovative TANGO results to the research, academic, and international community, the efficient exploitation and business planning of the TANGO concepts and tools to various domains, with the aim of identifying end users and potential customers, as well as the contribution of specific project results to relevant standardisation bodies.
In summary, TANGO’s value proposition is providing a trustworthy data management and sharing platform deployed in federated, distributed, multi-cloud environments ensuring data sovereignty, governance and provenance for public/private organisations.
• In relation to objective 1, related to the development of the TANGO Platform, three documents (D2.1 D2,2 and D2.3) has been delivered covering aspects such as the SOTA and gap analysis for all TANGO technical offerings, system requirements and specs, and the requirements and scenarios from our 6 pilots. An architecture working group was set to work-out the details of the final architecture and the compliance with IDS and GAIA-X principles, leading to the adoption of the latest FIWARE Data Space Connector as the backbone for data sharing in TANGO, to be extended with several of our technology offerings. The first stages of the integration of the different components into an initial version of the platform are under way.
• Objective 2, is about providing a secure, trusted and audible data management and sharing environment. The work done so far is reported in deliverable D3.1 including the description and implementation of the first iteration of components of WP3. In this sense it is worth mentioning that the project is providing alternative approaches for legally binding data sharing (using the FIDES component), or more relaxed cases (using rest of components) looking also a minimising the blockchain energy footprint, data encryption, trustworthiness scoring, and PDP/PEP modules for policy enforcement. These policies have a direct impact on the Gaia-X and data space models.
• In the case of objective 3, related to trust management, the delivery of the first set of components of WP4 has been reported in D4.1. This includes technologies such as Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI), user onboarding development, advanced features for user authentication, and countermeasure protection. Highlights of the first iteration are:
• Objective 4 is related to Artificial Intelligence and privacy risk assessment. The results in the reporting period have been documented in D5.1. The first iteration of components includes tools such as Exploratory Data Analysis Engine (EDAE), support for ML training and life-cycle (MLOps, Federated Learning and AutoML), hardware acceleration techniques, privacy assessment tools, AI explainability, and reduction in energy consumption for data centres.
• Finally, from the technical perspective objective 5 aims at the evaluation of the framework in the 6 TANGO pilots (Smart Hospitality, Autonomous Vehicles, Smart Manufacturing, Banking, Public Organisations and Retail). During the first half of the project the work in pilots was related to requirements, scenarios, metrics and KPIs for pilots defined in D2.2 as well as the preliminary planning in WP7 and the alignment with the TANGO technology offerings to pilots. The implementation and validation of the pilots starts formally in M24.
• Enhancements in the usage of Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) in the scope of data spaces.
• The User Behaviour Exchange Module (UBEM), for personalized predictions while safeguarding user privacy.
• The user continuous behavioural authentication, providing continuous user authentication without requiring user input to prevent unauthorized access and enhance user experience during login and multi-factor authentication.
• The privacy threat modelling and identification for trustworthy AI in the Privacy Enhancing Component (PEC). Dedicated to ensuring the responsible and ethical harnessing of AI and generative AI’s revolutionary benefits.
• The RENOPS component to shift energy-hungry processes when and where renewal energy is available.