APOSTLE
Full Title
new Approaches for Secure Distributed Data Processing and AccessDescription
Organisations and enterprises nowadays have to follow strict regulations regarding the way they handle sensitive and private data from their clients. Examples include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which stipends how EU organisations from any industry should treat sensitive information collected from their costumers. However, in order to grow their businesses, modern organisations need to collect, store, and process large amounts of personal data from their clients. Moreover, it is also common for organisations to share or even sell data between each other in well organised consortiums, and to resort to economy of scale third-party services like cloud computing. These trends create a natural conflict between the requirements imposed by governmental data regulations and the data processing needs of modern industries.
This exploratory project aims at addressing this natural conflict by exploring novel protocols for secure data processing and access at scale. In more detail, the project proposes looking at a set of promising principles and mechanisms that lay at the intersection between the fields of Systems Security, Applied Cryptography, and Distributed Systems, including Byzantine Consensus (BC), Byzantine Fault Tolerant State Machine Replication (BFT-SMR), Secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC), and Oblivious RAM (ORAM). Namely the project will explore the use of BC and BFT-SMR as a way of supporting dynamic MPC services in asynchronous networks; and the use of synchronisation-free techniques from distributed systems as a way of supporting highly concurrent and parallel ORAM protocols. Exploring these ideas will lead to new contributions to both the theory and practice of distributed systems security and confidential computing.