Latest News

Best Paper Award at Asiacrypt 2011 for PrimeLife researcher

The PrimeLife web-team congratulates our colleague Jan Camisch from IBM Research - Zurich as well as the co-authors Stephan Krenn and Victor Shoup for being awarded with the Best Paper Award at the 17th annual AsiaCrypt Conference held in Seoul, Korea, on December 4th - 8th, 2011.

The paper provides a method to design efficient cryptographic proof protocols that can be proven secure in a very strong security model. This assures that a protocols security is retained no matter in what environment a protocol is used. An example of such protocols are the privacy-enhancing technologies designed and applied in the ABC4Trust project. The ABC4Trust project took up the PrimeLife heritage in several areas including the testing and further development anonymous credentials.

The contribution with the title "A Framework for Practical Universally Composable Zero-Knowledge Protocols" has been published in the Springer LNCS series.
 

Abstract

Zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (ZK-PoK) for discrete logarithms and related problems are indispensable for practical cryptographic protocols. Recently, Camenisch, Kiayias, and Yung provided a specification language (the CKY-language) for such protocols which allows for a modular design and protocol analysis: for every zero-knowledge proof specified in this language, protocol designers are ensured that there exists an efficient protocol which indeed proves the specified statement.

Read more: Best Paper Award at Asiacrypt 2011 for PrimeLife researcher

Joint PrimeLife and ABC4Trust Credential Tutorial announced

Date: June 10th, 2011, from 10:00 to 16:30

Location: IBM Research Zurich, Säumerstrasse 4, 8803 Rüschlikon, Switzerland

Cost: no registration fee

Trustworthy, yet privacy-preserving authentication is necessary to enable long-term and lifelong privacy for users. Attribute-based credentials offer a solution allowing strong authentication while the user may remain anonymous towards the relying party and without the identity provider learning to know about the websites visited or services deployed by a user. The technology to deploy attribute-based credentials is available with IBM’s Identity Mixer and Microsoft’s U-Prove. The EC-funded project ABC4Trust now takes up the heritage of the PRIME and PrimeLife projects and will deploy systems using attribute-based credentials in actual production pilots and deliver open reference implementations.

PrimeLife and ABC4Trust organize a joint tutorial explaining the basics of the technology, its potential spheres of application for privacy-enhancing technologies and some building blocks of the underlying cryptography. The tutorial will be held in Rüschlikon (near Zurich) on Friday June 10, 2011 and hosted by IBM Research Zurich.

Tutorials will be given by expert researchers from Microsoft and IBM, presenting a common view on Privacy-ABC technologies that encompasses both the U-Prove and Identity Mixer technologies.

Session 1, start: 10:00

General introduction to privacy-enhanced attribute-based credentials (Privacy-ABCs)

• Comparison to traditional public-key credentials
• High-level concepts and features
• Cryptographic building blocks (high-level overview)

Session 2

Integrating Privacy-ABCs in identity management architectures and policy languages

Session 3

Real-life application scenarios & demos

Session 4, end: 16:30

Closing remarks

PrimeLife is pleased to invite participants arriving on Thursday evening for a dinner. Attendees of the PrimeLife Summit Event and the SEC2011 may conveniently join
the meeting by extending their stay in Switzerland and commute via train from Lucerne to Zurich.
Hotel rooms have been reserved in Rüschlikon for booking until the May 20th.

For questions, registration and accommodation information please contact: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Update: Download the agenda as PDF

PrimeLife announces workshop on eHealth and privacy

Date: June 16-17, 2011
Location: Middlesex University, Trent Park campus, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ

This joint workshop will be co-organised by Middlesex University together with the European Commission co-financed project PrimeLife.

Excerpt from the workshop announcement:

A key challenge is the protection of health data throughout a person's lifetime - whether those data are personal or more generic. Indeed, it may be necessary to extend this protection beyond a lifetime, as disclosure of the data could adversely affect the individual's family members, descendants, and social or racial groupings. How feasible is it to control uses of these data as systems, organisations and data processing change? What other societal and socio-economic difficulties may arise that mean that the handling of personal, private or confidential health and medical data will alter? Could certain rules or restrictions about the handling of private data actually impede beneficial societal or socio-economic developments?

Further Information to be published: http://www.primelife.eu/workshops/

[Update] The workshop has launched it's official website.

Summer School 2011 announced

IFIP Summer School 2011 announced with participation of PrimeLife
Date: September 5-9, 2011 Location: University of Trento/Italy

Excerpt from the Call for Papers:
Internet applications, such as Web 2.0 applications and cloud computing, increasingly pose privacy dilemmas. When they communicate over the Internet, individuals leave trails of personal data, which may be stored for many years to come. These developments raise substantial new challenges for personal privacy at the technical, social, ethical, regulatory, and legal levels: How can privacy be protected in emerging Internet applications such as collaborative scenarios and virtual communities? What frameworks and tools could be used to gain, regain and maintain informational self-determination and lifelong privacy?

These questions will be addressed by this year's IFIP Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management for Emerging Internet Applications throughout a person's lifetime. After the success of the 2009 and 2010 PrimeLife/IFIP Summer Schools, IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing), Working Groups 9.2, 9.6/11.7 11.4, 11.6 will in cooperation with the PrimeLife project consortium and the projects ABC4Trust, Endorse, NESSOS, PETweb II, U-PrIm  jointly hold a multidisciplinary summer school. A special focus of the 2011 IFIP Summer School will be on application scenarios and use cases to assess the extent to which the PrimeLife project outcomes and other research results can be practically applied.

Other PrimeLife workshops:http://www.primelife.eu/events/work-shops
For previous Summer Schools see: http://www.cs.kau.se/IFIP-summerschool