GCA

Work Description:
I’m excited about contributing to the re-decentralised of the Internet. I am currently a PhD student exploring decentralised technologies for the development of decentralised smart cities. A city is decentralised when to a lesser or greater extent it is free from monopolies that gather, own and control large volumes of the data that the city produces. I feel strongly against and depart from the traditional centralised model that sooner or later leads to unduly data monopolisation. The general topic of my research is the development Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) for implementing decentralised application integrations that are capable of retrieving data produced from independent companies and processing it to add value under strict data protection requirements such as privacy, non-exfiltration, non-dissemination and non-monopolisations. PETs are an abstract concept that covers a broad range of complementary and competing specific technologies that can be used for solving different problems, for example, for building Secure Private Computing-as-a-service. Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are one of the most promising PETS and the main focus of my research. My ambition is to design algorithms and build software tools to demonstrate that privacy-aware decentralised application integrations can be implemented with TEEs implemented in software or hardware. Software-based TEE take advantage of latest progress in Cryptography. Emerging techniques in this direction are Differential Privacy (DF), Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE). My task is to examine them to determine if they are ready for building practical applications. Hardware-based TEE are more mature to the extent that there are several competing technologies in the market. The TEEs under examination include Intel SGX, ARM trustzone, AMD virtualisation, Amazon AWS Nitro Enclaves AVAILABLE FROM THE CLOUD, and attestables built on the basis of hardware capabilities included on the Morello Board plataform released by ARM for evaluation purposes in 2022.