FENTEC - Functional ENcryption TEChnologies

Introduction

Functional Encryption is an emerging paradigm that allows fine-grained access to encrypted data, overcoming the all-or-nothing access provided by traditional public key encryption. FENTEC aims to overcome limitations of classical all-nothing encryption and improve existing FE schemes and researching novel ones which will be provided through a unified API to facilitate their integration, stepping forward in the introduction of Functional encrypting technology in ICT technologies.
Our mission is to make the functional encryption paradigm ready for wide-range applications and foster the development and adoption of Functional Encryption.

Who is the project designed for?

FENTEC is designed for the whole ICT industry and stakeholders that operate in environments where data confidentiality and privacy is needed, but partial access to data through external parties is unavoidable.
Companies developing and offering services, data hosting and data analysis are benefitted with more flexible and widely applicable methods of encryption, that will increase security while the task of structuring and storing data is eased, as it allows more uniform data structures instead of split data based on privacy nature; which is more proper tan all-nothing traditional encrypting techniques.

How is your project benefitting the end-user?

Companies with customer-centric focus can grant access to specific parts of data of their customer in order to let third parties perform analysis to get a better understanding of their business, customs and interests of their customers, without revealing any private or sensitive data.

FENTEC benefits society as a whole by presenting citizens with platforms offering a higher degree of security and trustworthiness, as it will be demonstrated in the pilots of technologies supporting secure IoT devices, auditable digital currency mechanisms which preserve privacy and protect property and privacy-preserving data analysis.

In that light, FENTEC shall enhance multi-lateral trust in electronic-mediated relations, which has been identified as key for the success and flourishing of the European digital market.

Please briefly describe the results your project achieved so far

The Project started recently and is in requirements elicitation and algorithms design phase.

What are the next steps for your project?

At this early state of the project we have started with the implementation of existing functional encryption schemes, such as Attribute based Encryption.
During the next 10 months we will finish the first release of ABE and at least one more scheme, together with a simple and easy to use API to expose this cryptographic functionality.