Cryptography is a key enabler of emerging applications from Industry 4.0 over autonomous driving to smart wearables. However, currently deployed cryptographic techniques (often dating back to the 80s and 90s) were not designed with today's heterogeneous challenges in mind.
Post-Quanten Cryptographie
As cryptographically relevant quantum computers continue to advance, there is a growing need for methods that can verifiably guarantee the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of data in the long term, even in a “post-quantum” world. “Quantum-computer-safe” technologies are encryption methods that cannot be decrypted by quantum computers, even after they become available.
In recent years, the Cryptography Group at the Center for Digital Safety & Security at AIT has focused its research efforts on establishing AIT as a center of excellence for post-quantum secure cryptography (PQC) within Austria, as well as in the European and international context. The group is developing methods that can continue to provide verifiable security guarantees for data in a so-called “post-quantum” world with powerful quantum computers. In close collaboration with the Center’s experts in quantum encryption, the team is working on a hybrid approach combining post-quantum secure methods with quantum key distribution (QKD) to merge the physical security guarantees of QKD with the end-to-end security guarantees of PQC. The expertise gained at all levels is simultaneously being actively contributed to the field of European and international standardization.
As a coordinator of projects such as PREPARED (KIRAS), AUTKRYPTO (K-PASS), or QCI-CAT (Digital Europe Program) and as a partner in projects such as POSEIDON (Horizon Europe), the team has established itself as a reliable partner and central point of contact for post-quantum research for Austrian stakeholders and beyond. The migration of existing complex systems was demonstrated, for example, as part of the KIRAS project PREPARED, in which, together with the Federal Chancellery and other partners from industry and academia, ID Austria’s PDF signature solution was prototypically migrated to a post-quantum secure version.
Solutions/Offering
Our groups aims at developing enhanced cryptographic mechanisms to overcome currently existing limitations, e.g., regarding long-term security and privacy (as demanded by the GDPR), fine-grained and versatile access to sensitive data, scalability and efficiency on resource-constrained devices, and outsourced computations on sensitive data.
Challenges/Key Questions
- Design scalable cryptographic solutions with provable security guarantees
- Design long-term secure cryptographic mechanisms in particular secure against quantum adversaries
- Develop mechanisms enabling fine-grained and versatile sharing of sensitive data maintaining confidentiality and integrity
- Ease GDPR compliance by developing privacy-enhancing technologies
- Provide secure and efficient implementations for industry applications
- Standardize novel cryptographic mechanisms for faster adoption and better interoperability
CREDENTIAL Project H2020
This video introduces the main ambition of the H2020 project CREDENTIAL, an EU funded innovation action researching and developing secure and privacy-friendly solutions for data-sharing and identity management.
PRISMACLOUD Project H2020
In this video we explain in simple words how the technology of “secret sharing” developed within PRISMACLOUD can help citizens to safely store and share their data in the cloud. A citizen can save an electronic document in the cloud, for example a photo, and this document will be transformed into multiple parts, where none of them will contain a single piece of information and these parts are then stored with different cloud providers. In that case none of the cloud providers has access to the document but only the authorized person. In case of fraud or a cloud provider crashes, citizens are not in danger and won’t be lost.
PRISMACLOUD is a EU funded research project developing the next generation of cloud security technologies. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644962.
