Denmark, a European powerhouse in privacy-enhancing technology
One of the privacy-enhancing technology areas in the European Union Cybersecurity Agency's (ENISA) "Data Protection Engineering - From Theory to Practice" (related information) introduced in the 93rd instalment of this series is "Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC)". Multiparty Computation).
According to the ENISA report, the concept of secure multiparty computation is a set of cryptographic protocols that allow data to be shared among a set of participants (Party) without each participant seeing the data of other participants.
The aim is to solve the issue of mutual trust by distributing computational processing to other parties. Typical examples of hidden multiparty computation include Byzantine consensus (extending the computation process to multiple participants, who bid in an auction without revealing their bids) and Danish real-life applications (Danish of farmers to determine the best price for sugar beets among farmers without the need for a central auctioneer).
The latter is detailed in ``Secret Multiparty Computation Goes Live'', published in 2009 in the journal: Financial Cryptology and Data Security.
Partisia, a Danish university start-up company, has supported this research team from a technical perspective, consisting of researchers from the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University, Copenhagen Business School, and the Alexandra Institute.
Partisia is a start-up company founded by advanced cryptographic engineers and software developers from Aarhus University located in Denmark. Partisia develops and provides secure multiparty Computation and privacy enhancing software solutions for commercial purposes. ing.
Initially, Partisia focused on manufacturing contracts used for spectrum license sales, energy-related products, and secure large-scale auctions, but has since expanded to include infrastructure for cryptographic Key Management and general-purpose infrastructure for private computation, as well as cloud. The company is increasingly developing and delivering a variety of applications across platforms, from computing to blockchain technology.
For your information, Aarhus University, where Partisia is a spin out from, is a part of the European Union's (EU) research and development support program "Horizon Europe", and is working on "SPEC: Secure, Private, Effective Multiparty Computing" (implementation period: January 1, 2019 to October 31, 2024) and “Privacy for Provable Metadata” (implementation period: August 1, 2023 to July 31, 2025) Serving as a coordinator, he also focuses on conferences related to privacy enhancement technology and human resource development support activities.
Danish privacy deep tech supporting responsible AI comes to Japan
Most recently, Partisia was part of a delegation program organised by the Embassy of Denmark in Japan in response to the visit of Denmark's Minister of Digitalization and Gender Equality, Marie Bjerre, to Tokyo (April 22-23, 2024). She came to Japan and gave a presentation at Keio University titled ``Secure computational processing of global data with verifiable trust for all citizens''.
Partisia focuses on the public sector, including healthcare, and outlines the realisation of collaborative relationships between hospitals and organisations using confidential multi-party calculations, with a focus on the use of privacy protection measures.
An example of the company's privacy-enhancing technology is Decentralised Identity. Decentralised Identity aims to connect people (and things) with trusted, verifiable attributes and other verifiable information. Trustworthy information comes from multiple verifiable sources, such as the issuer's driver's licence, education certificate, etc.
Partisia's Decentralised Identity consists of the following components:
Holder: The holder of the identity wallet and the subject (or object) in question
Issuer: A person or organisation that holds trusted information about a holder.
Receiver: A person or organisation that requires information about the holder
Verifiable Credentials: Trusted information that has been verified by the holder.
Claims: Information verified in verifiable credentials
Verifiable Presentation: Presentation of insights from claim content in verifiable credentials.
At the centre of the figure is an identity wallet holder that activates trusted information that is verified in the form of verifiable credentials from one or more issuers. Via Partisia's platform, holders can activate these to meet recipients' needs with plain text or privacy-preserving calculations. Recipients can obtain identity verification or other derivative insights (e.g., over 18 years old, vaccinated, citizen of a given country).
In this presentation in Japan, Partisia outlined the realisation of collaborative relationships between hospitals and organisations using hidden Multiparty Computation, with a focus on the use of privacy enhancing measures in the public sector, including healthcare. ing. The book then proposes a future of data ownership that places individual citizens at the centre of their personal data and allows data to be controlled and shared across industries in a transparent and secure manner.
Part 75 of this series covered blockchain/distributed ledger technology, and Part 99 covered NFT (non-fungible tokens), but Partisia's Decentralised Identity is based on immutable blockchain/distributed ledger technology and distributed cryptographic calculations. It is built on a platform that combines processing networks. The company actively promotes collaboration across industries such as finance and medicine, and is also attracting attention from a WEB3/NFT perspective.
