The issue of how to preserve our fundamental rights on the Internet is urgent. In particular, NEXTLEAP is looking at how we send messages everyday across the Internet. There is a saying that email is like a postcard. But, email is much much worse than a postcard. You know people can read your post card, but most people don’t know is that our emails are collected and data mined for our most sensitive and intimate information.
This is important for society as foreign powers and corporations around the world are tracking our social network via email correspondence, threatening the fundamental rights guaranteed all European citizens. It’s not just an problem for individuals. It’s a problem for enterprises: [PAUSE] approximately 90% of successful cyberattacks that cause significant harm to the enterprise come in through email. As threats from surveillance and targeted attacks continue to grow, the status quo will be both unacceptable and untenable. Luckily there is hope. There is a way to make email (mostly) secure. Locally encrypted email using a public key encryption protocol called OpenPGP works. But, OpenPGP is incredibly difficult to use and has not been updated since the 1990s.
The overall objective of the NEXTLEAP project is to build the fundamental interdisciplinary internet science necessary to create decentralised, privacy-preserving, and rights-respecting protocols for the next generation of the Internet, replacing out of date protocols with new and easier-to-user versions with better security and privacy. Importantly, we will fix and make usable secure messaging, including PGP, by building on new research on blockchains as well as the fundamental advances made by the Signal Protocol. For society, NEXTLEAP will contribute to Europe taking the “next leap ahead” of the rest of the world by solving the fundamental challenge of determining both how to scientifically build, and how to help citizens and projects, adopt open-source, decentralized, and privacy-preserving digital social platforms in contrast to proprietary centralized cloud-based services and pervasive surveillance that function at the expense of rights and technological sovereignty.
