ProPriM · Provable Privacy for Metadata
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2023-08-01 → 2025-07-31
- EU contribution
- €214,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Provable Privacy for Metadata
Metadata, such as who talks to whom, how often and what time, is by default exposed on a network, enabling anyone monitoring the network to collect metadata about connected people, or devices. While defenses exist, they are typically designed to obfuscate that communication took place by hiding network communication. Our insight is that metadata still can leak from the application itself—rendering network protections insufficient. This lack of defenses poses a serious cybersecurity threat: society as a whole is practically defenseless against metadata collection. Our goal is to design new solutions, called network protocols, to guarantee that metadata is protected during transit. An added challenge of designing these protocols is that they need to be efficient enough for anyone to use—it would be unacceptable to use a protocol that will immediately drain your phone’s battery, and it would also not be acceptable if for example a website took several minutes to load. As a consequence, protocols need to be designed with a suitable trade-off between the protection they offer, and the performance they offer.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Protecting user’s online behaviour is a challenging privacy problem. In this project, we will develop communication protocols for metadata privacy. Metadata is implicit information, such as when and how many messages are sent, and can therefore not be protected using standard encryption. Unlike encryption, metadata privacy is not currently available in instant messaging services, due to the impracticality of current protocols. To protect users, developing new, practical protocols for metadata privacy is therefore essential. Moreover, metadata privacy is a EU priority, which will be regulated by the ePrivacy Regulation that is currently being drafted. Consequently protocols that guarantee metadata privacy for instant messaging needs to be designed to meet EU's needs.We propose a holistic project to address metadata privacy, ranging from conceptual design to implementations of protocols in software. By combining Nelson’s background in privacy, and Askarov’s expertise in formal methods, we expect to be able to tackle metadata privacy from a new perspective. Specifically, we will design protocols that are provably private. That is, we will guarantee that our protocols are free from unintentional leakages. In addition, our protocols will be designed to be feasible to use on battery constrained devices such as phones.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- AARHUS UNIVERSITET · Aarhus CCoordinatorDenmark
Links
- View on CORDIS
- DOI: 10.3030/101064140
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e507b02480&appId=PPGMS
- https://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/documents/downloadPublic?documentIds=080166e51f2f71a1&appId=PPGMS
Data: CORDIS, © European Union