Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PROMETHEUS (PRivacy preserving pOst-quantuM systEms from advanced crypTograpHic mEchanisms Using latticeS)
Teaser
Privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols allow users to take common daily life actions online (e.g, purchases, reservations or voting) without leaking sensitive personal information. They typically combine various tools such as digital signatures, homomorphic encryption or...
Summary
Privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols allow users to take common daily life actions online (e.g, purchases, reservations or voting) without leaking sensitive personal information. They typically combine various tools such as digital signatures, homomorphic encryption or zero-knowledge proofs. While practical solutions exist under RSA or discrete logarithm assumptions, they are all completely vulnerable to quantum attacks, so that working quantum computers would immediately make them obsolete.
To address this threat, the PROMETHEUS project will enable users’ privacy in the post-quantum world by providing a complete toolbox of innovative, efficient and quantum-secure cryptographic techniques adapted to modern services. It will provide new building blocks in relation with international competitions and standardisation processes, as well as advanced properties dedicated to the design of sophisticated protocols. To this end, PROMETHEUS will focus on lattice-based cryptography. It will first conduct an in-depth study of the hardness of lattice problems in the quantum world, which will drive the development of better basic tools for lattice-based cryptography. PROMETHEUS will then design and implement basic cryptographic building blocks such as signatures and encryption, and will provide concrete realisations of advanced privacy-preserving protocols.
As a concrete outcome, PROMETHEUS will highlight the feasibility of post-quantum privacy via demonstrators for several real-life use-cases, including electronic payments, e-voting and cyberthreat intelligence.
Work performed
During this first period, until the Month 18 of the project, the PROMETHEUS Consortium performed all the milestones scheduled for this first period, which were:
- the successful project start;
- the end of the technical survey; and
- the use case definition.
Three thematic surveys have been published by the Consortium:
- Survey on computational problems, cryptanalysis, and basic tools;
- Survey of existing building blocks for practical advanced protocols; and
- Survey of existing privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols.
At the same time, the PROMETHEUS project proposed written deliverables in order to define the four use case requirements:
- Cyber Threat Intelligence use case requirements;
- Anonymous credential use case requirements;
- e-consumer use case requirements; and
- e-voting use case requirements.
Besides, the website is available at this address: www.h2020prometheus.eu/and the members communicate about their activities with the twitter account h2020prometheus.
Final results
PROMETHEUS project will give a new set of practical primitives (signatures, public-key encryption, pseudorandom functions, etc.) and suitable methods to combine them with efficient zero-knowledge proofs. These new tools will lead to the design of practical advanced protocols, like anonymous credentials, digital cash or electronic voting, that maintain users’ privacy against quantum adversaries. The security of these protocols will be considered in its entirety, from theoretical definitions allowing quantum accesses to certain functionalities to practical implementations accounting for side-channel leakages.
The aim is to find solutions to push to demonstrators the most relevant cryptographic specifications.
Website & more info
More info: http://www.h2020prometheus.eu/.