Balancing online security with data utility

Protecting online transactions against hackers often involves a loss of user friendliness. But that may no longer be the case since an EU-financed project is finding novel ways to strike a balance between privacy and utility.

Despite advances in computer security, data remains vulnerable to hackers. Although contemporary cryptographic techniques guard transactions, they often do not provide an adequate balance between the privacy and the utility of stored data. In fact, data utility is often grafted on top of the cryptographic mechanisms through monolithic key management.

The project 'Cryptographic techniques for reconciling utility with privacy in computer systems' (RECUP) tackles this privacy–utility conundrum by finding ways of optimally protecting the user and provider of a service, without reducing the usability of the data.

During the project's first phase, RECUP developed security models and new encryption and authentication protocols that extend so-called fine-grain privacy controls.

The project's modelling efforts dealt with all the basic cryptographic operations involved when a hacker tries to tamper with the internal state of the primitive. RECUP also studied and developed methods to utilise distributed systems to minimise vulnerability through special algorithms that exploit any given entity in the network just once for a particular abstract operation.

To enhance the security of data, RECUP invented a technique known as secure in-network processing of exact SUM queries (SIES), which is highly secure yet bandwidth-friendly.

Once the project concludes at the end of 2014, RECUP will have paved the way to a system that does not require leak-prone clear text databases of sensitive information. In addition, it will have the in-built capacity to recover effectively from key exposure incidents.

Related link:
http://cordis.europa.eu