SAFEcrypto provides a new generation of practical, robust and physically secure post quantum cryptographic solutions that ensure long-term security for future ICT systems, services and applications.  Secure Architectures of Future Emerging Cryptography (www.safecrypto.eu) was a €4M project led by Prof Maire O’Neill from CSIT.  Thales, UK; Dell/EMC, Ireland; IBM Research, Switzerland; an SME and leading European universities collaborated in the project which focused on lattice-based cryptography (LBC).  LBC is resistant to attacks from powerful quantum computers but little work had been done to optimise its performance in hardware and software implementations nor assess its resistance to side channel attacks.

 

 

The project delivered proof-of-concept demonstrations for three practical, real-world case studies.  The first was network space-based entities where new methods are required due to the longevity of satellites and their public-key solutions need to be secure for a long period of time stretching to several decades.

The second was a Smart Tag case study based on the needs of low-cost RFID sensor tags, tag readers and backend tracking applications. A highly efficient IBE (Identity Based Encryption) scheme was demonstrated.

The third domain was privacy-preserving municipal data analytics, designed for collaborative analysis of large government-owned data sets.  Here key management is a major concern and we integrated lattice-based key material into the KMIP protocol and demonstrated interworking with commercial key management servers.

The case studies all make use of the open source library of lattice-based algorithms that was implemented during the project, libsafecrypto (https://github.com/safecrypto).  It contains three new algorithms submitted for post-quantum cryptography standardisation.  They are strong candidates that clearly display the practical, robust and physically secure characteristics that underpin all the work undertaken in the SAFEcrypto project.

SAFEcrypto produced 37 academic papers (including 7 journal papers) and project partners are currently editing a book on “Lattice-based Cryptography: From Theory to Practice” in conjunction with Springer publishing company.