Prof. Miroslaw Kutylowski awarded with OPUS 26+LAP/Weave

The project, “Identity wallets in a hostile environment: privacy and trust ‘by-design,’” focuses on verifying the identity and/or credentials of digital stakeholders, which is crucial for the secure operation of cyberspace. Identification procedures should reveal only the necessary information, in accordance with the principle of data minimization, which is in turn required by the Personal Data Protection Regulation (RODO).

The project involves the use of tools such as attribute certificates and tokens, which confer certain rights without revealing full identification data. It also introduces the idea of decentralizing the identification ecosystem, which aims to increase security by dispersing data and responsibilities.

The project aims to develop solutions that are resilient to threats such as infections with hostile code, device failures, and lack of strong access control mechanisms. The project plans to implement mechanisms for data protection and user verifiability of processes at the cryptographic layer, independent of the hardware layer. Special attention is given to secure digital signatures and a system of cryptographic tokens, which are to be lightweight and transparent for users. The project will be carried out in cooperation with CISPA.

Prof. Miroslaw Kutylowski is Head of the Department of Cryptology at NASK. He works on privacy and cryptography technologies, taking into account issues of regulatory nature and algorithms for distributed systems. A particularly intensive area of his research is cryptographic protocols related to identification and authentication, implementing the principles of personal data protection and taking into account the technical conditions related to the realities of the devices used for identification. The second priority direction is the study of the possibilities inherent in hostile cryptography and also the possibilities offered by anamorphic cryptography.

The partner of the project “Identity wallets in a hostile environment: privacy and trust ‘by-design’” is the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security. It is a national Big Science institution within the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers. Their research explores all aspects of Information Security.