Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FENTEC (Functional Encryption Technologies)
Reporting period: 2019-07-01 to 2021-02-28
Functional encryption (FE), has been recently been introduced as a new paradigm of encryption systems to overcome all-or-nothing limitations of classical encryption. In an FE system the decryptor deciphers a function over the message plaintext: such functional decryptability makes it feasible to process encrypted data (e.g. on the Internet) and obtain a partial view of the message plaintext. This extra flexibility over classical encryption is a powerful enabler for many emerging security technologies (i.e. controlled access, searching and computing on encrypted data, program obfuscation…).
FENTEC’s mission is to make the functional encryption paradigm ready for wide-range applications, integrating it in ICT technologies as naturally as classical encryption. The primary objective is the efficient and application-oriented development of functional encryption systems. FENTEC’s team of cryptographers, software and hardware experts and information technology industry partners that will document functional encryption needs of specific applications and
subsequently design, develop, implement and demonstrate applied use of functional cryptography. Ultimately, a functional encryption library for both SW and HW-oriented application will be documented and made public so that it may be used by European ICT entities. With it, the FENTEC team will build emerging security technologies that increase the trustworthiness of the European ICT services and products. Concretely, the FENTEC team will showcase the expressiveness and versatility of the functional encryption paradigm in 3 use cases:
• Privacy-preserving digital currency, enforcing flexible auditing models
• Anonymous data analytics enabling computation of statistics over encrypted data, protecting European Fundamental
Rights of Data Protection and Privacy
• Key and content distribution with improved performance & efficiency as foundational technology for establishing
secure communication among a vast amount of IOT devices.
FENTEC’s mission is to make the functional encryption paradigm ready for wide-range applications, integrating it in ICT technologies as naturally as classical encryption. The primary objective is the efficient and application-oriented development of functional encryption systems. FENTEC’s team of cryptographers, software and hardware experts and information technology industry partners that will document functional encryption needs of specific applications and
subsequently design, develop, implement and demonstrate applied use of functional cryptography. Ultimately, a functional encryption library for both SW and HW-oriented application will be documented and made public so that it may be used by European ICT entities. With it, the FENTEC team will build emerging security technologies that increase the trustworthiness of the European ICT services and products. Concretely, the FENTEC team will showcase the expressiveness and versatility of the functional encryption paradigm in 3 use cases:
• Privacy-preserving digital currency, enforcing flexible auditing models
• Anonymous data analytics enabling computation of statistics over encrypted data, protecting European Fundamental
Rights of Data Protection and Privacy
• Key and content distribution with improved performance & efficiency as foundational technology for establishing
secure communication among a vast amount of IOT devices.
During the reporting period, all due deliverables have been submitted (Public deliverables are available in the FENTEC official website) and all due milestones have been achieved. As part of the WP2, the final version of the dissemination plan has been released, as well as the final iteration of the standardization and exploitation report; the FETNEC website has been set-up has been periodically updated and several communicaton activities have been carried out (social networks, attendance to events...). In WP3, FENTEC technical and legal requirements have been finalized and reported. In WP4 the rosk has been focusing on the Functional Encryption Schemes for the prototypes. WP5 has focused on the security and trust models and the hardware-optimized schemes, hardware-assisted schemes and hardware-operated schemes has been performed. In WP6 the work has been concentrated in the develpments of the FENTEC functional encryption tooset API. Finally, WP7 has focused on the finalization of the three FENTEC prototypes.
With regards to maximize the impact of FENTEC in the functional encryption applications, a clear and coherent approach for dissemination, exploitation and communication has being defined. This strategy is being monitored by some KPIs which were defined in the proposal stage of the project. Those KPIs were divided in two groups, techical and non-technical, and in both cases the selected target is progressing weel, and it is expected all KPIs were achieved by the end of the project. FENTEC project impacts are intended to go beyond technical and economic levels by including knowledge transfer and proficiency development. The impact of FENTEC is highlighted thanks to the exploitation plan of the project results. Indeed, FENTEC has produced a range of high-added value assets for exploitation. For example, the truly anonymous data collection prototype addresses the problem of privacy-preserving computation of data analytics. The issue is that data to be analysed is sent by the user in cleartext to the analyser allowing any kind of computation regardless of the purpose. In this use-case, users are enabled to choose the data they are willing to disclose by encrypting the data using the appropriate Decentralized Multi Client Functional Encryption scheme. The developed cryptographic API has been integrated in its DataPeps encryption platform in order to strengthen its position in cybersecurity market. In case of the privacy enhanced digital currency prototype, the main objective is to lower the risk of sensitive information leakage by developing a privacy-enhancing digital currency created by the integration of Functional Encryption with signed tokenized eCoins. By doing this, FENTEC will benefit the European society and administration from the best properties of both physical and digital money: Anonymity, Convenience, Taxation and a higher level of Auditability. As of today, the Consortium has developed several tasks to achieve this objective: Design and first implementation of the payment platform (without FE and modularization), Specification of the pilot and design of the wrappers to adapt Golang FE libraries to Java.