FENTEC Project: Increasing Trustworthiness of ICT solutions

In recent years, a notion of “functional encryption” (FE) has emerged as a new paradigm for public-key encryption, wherein a receiver is able to learn certain functions of the underlying message based on its secret keys, not necessarily the decryption.

FENTEC – Functional ENcryption TEChnologies is a Research and Innovation Action whose mission is to make the functional encryption paradigm ready for a wide range of applications, integrating it in ICT technologies as naturally as classical encryption.

The FENTEC project is developing new Functional ENcryption (FE) as an effective alternative to the all-or-nothing approach of traditional encryption, which allows partial views of encrypted data and effectively improves the security of complex systems by compartmentalisation of data or computation over the data. As a novelty, it addresses the challenge of designing general-purpose FE by supporting the decryption of arbitrary (efficiently computable) functions with new cryptographic algorithms and hardware concepts within practical metrics, balancing individual functional, efficiency and security requirements.

Contribution to the cybersecurity community

The FENTEC project is highly relevant in environments that seek to guarantee a high level of confidentiality and privacy of data, while ensuring careful control of partial access to data by different entities, protecting the fundamental European rights of privacy and data protection. The security, efficiency, expressiveness and versatility of the new FE approach will be showcased in three use-cases:

• Privacy-preserving digital currency, enforcing flexible auditing models: providing customer privacy and tools to audit the payment system itself.
• Data Collection and Local Decision Making: detecting motion at the gateway level on an encrypted video stream coming from security cameras.
• Privacy-Preserving Statistical Analysis: enabling Wallix clients to be able to perform analytics about their clients’ data while providing guarantees as to the privacy of those data.

FENTEC goals & results: supporting the future Horizon Europe and Digital Europe initiatives

Beyond technical and economic impacts, this applied innovation has important applications in achieving the public good and a positive social impact, as it enables the provision of controlled social benefits and fraud reduction.

1. Increasing the trustworthiness of European ICT services and products and the competitiveness of the European cryptography and ICT security industry.
2. Increasing trust in ICT and online services.
3. Protecting the European Fundamental Rights of Privacy and Data Protection.
4. Improving performance and efficiency of cryptography beyond the state of the art, enabling manufacturers to eventually put in the market new hardware solutions.
5. Protecting against emerging threats such as quantum computation.

Thanks to the use cases, performing statistics on European clients’ sensitive data will be secure through Wallix pilot; video surveillance will be possible while respecting the privacy of EU citizens through the Kudelski prototype, and a privacy-preserving digital currency will be auditable through Atos pilot. Indeed, academic partners are designing the most suitable cryptographic protocols for industrial partners. In addition, the project is in close collaboration with other Cybersecurity PPP Actions (esp. in Cryptography -DS-06-2017- PROMETHEUS, PRIViLEDGE, FutureTPM) and exchange experience.

Visit the FENTEC page to find more relevant products and services that they have developed.