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Data protection and trustworthiness: Both can be secured on the Internet at the same time

January 20th, 2015

One of the most widely recognized EU projects of Frankfurt's Goethe University will present its results on Tuesday (Jan 20) in the offices of the Hessian State Delegation to the European Union in Brussels: "ABC4Trust" is the acronym for an international project, for which Frankfurt Professor Kai Rannenberg is the spokesman. The project has developed solutions that will markedly increase the trustworthiness of personal data in the Internet while offering optimal privacy protection. In addition to the President of Goethe University, Prof. Dr. Birgitta Wolff, participants in the demonstration of the project results this coming Tuesday will also include Günther Oettinger or a representative of the Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society and Jan Albrecht, member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA and rapporteur for the European General Data Protection Regulation.

The first three letters of ABC4Trust stand for "attribute-based credentials". The intention is to supply any Internet provider with only the relevant features (attributes) of the user in each case, but the attributes will also be furnished with a type of credibility certificate (credential) from an entity trusted by the provider. Here is an example: If someone buys a book over the Internet, the online merchant does not need to know anything about the purchaser's date of birth, blood group or hobbies shared with friends. Such information may be important in other Internet contexts, for example when contacting a health insurer or in a chat with friends. But what is of prime importance to the online merchant is that the user's account data is correct. The user can demonstrate this with a bankcard or credit card.

The user can store his "credentials" in a type of wallet, from which he can display the important attributes in each case. This is clearly better for the user than the current situation in the Internet, in which identity information is repeatedly queried from the source, the so-called "identity provider". Rannenberg, who has occupied the Deutsche Telekom Chair for "Mobile Business & Multilateral Security" since 2002, comments: "Since 2009, ABC4Trust has been developing a Privacy ABC-based system for electronic identification that allows users to shield their privacy and simultaneously offers security to their counterpart - the service provider. We have successfully tested the system in two pilot applications; a communications platform in a school in Sweden and an anonymous course evaluation system at the University of Patras."

A total of approximately 50 scientists have cooperated in various sub-projects, and the EU has supported ABC4Trust with just under 9 million Euros since 2010 from the 7th Research Framework Programme. In addition to Goethe University, the international project consortium includes Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz Schleswig-Holstein, Darmstadt Technical University and non-university research institutions from Denmark and Sweden, corporations such as IBM, Microsoft and Nokia Networks, and an encryption specialist from France.

A variety of pilot applications will be presented at the closing event in Brussels. The project also looks at ways in which the two advanced technologies for identity management using "attribute-based credentials" (both from American providers: U-Prove from Microsoft and Idemix from IBM) can be sensibly linked. The ABC4Trust project has been built using both of these technologies, so that the user is not dependent on one management system or the other, but can instead choose between them. ABC4Trust is also intended to be an openly accessible technology, which is a research condition required by the EU. The project team therefore had to bring together all the players. "That was not always particularly easy, but we managed to do it!", notes programme director Prof. Rannenberg.

At the presentation this coming Tuesday, he and his international colleagues will also offer a look forward at future developments in identity management. These include the use of these privacy ABCs in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, so that privacy can be better protected in those fields as well. The guests at this event in the Hessian State Delegation Office will also include: Michael Garcia (Deputy Director of the "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" of the National Institute for Standardization and Technology (NIST) of the US Department of Commerce) and Achim Klabunde (Manager of the IT policy sector for the European Data Protection Supervisor).

More information:
Participation in the final event (20 January 9:30 am - 6:00 pm) is still open for interested parties and journalists; registration at: abc4trust.eu/index.php/events/177-summit-announce

Provided by Goethe University Frankfurt

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