TNO’s Early Research Programme in Next Generation Crypto

One of our partners in the roadmap crypto communication, TNO, has recently announced their Early Research Programme (ERP) in next-generation crypto. The aim of this programme is to expand the usage of cryptography beyond its contemporary offer and use cases and operationalise emerging technologies towards solving grand societal challenges. This is closely linked to the mission of our roadmap, where we aim to diversify and strengthen the supply chain for cryptography research and development.

Our roadmap is already leveraging existing technologies towards new use cases (e.g. our upcoming Offshore Wind accelerator) and emerging technologies towards existing use cases (e.g. joint PQC research). With the start of the ERP, we can now add emerging technologies towards new use cases to this list as well.

The ambition of TNO is to bring quantum-secure analysis of distributed data to the next level. So that, in a few years, secure data-sharing solutions can be engineered, validated, and exploited for applications that use large amounts of data and require real-time output. That will require a mix of technological innovations (e.g. quantum-safe distributed computing and automatic security validation) but also novel legal and policy approaches to ensure privacy regulatory compliance.

Some of the societal challenges the ERP will focus on are:

• The societal dilemma of camera surveillance and privacy, which could be addressed through multi-party image analysis.
• Reducing health care costs by remote patient monitoring.
• Optimising logistical chains by securely sharing commercially sensitive data, enabling multi-fleet management without centralisation.
• Secure linking of fragmentally stored data, enabling the creation of a distributed smart energy grid, helping to reduce poverty, and improving environmental models.
  

We’re excited to support TNO in the further rolling out of this programme, in which they’ll be joined by some of our other partners at the Ministry of Justice & Security, CWI, and Twente University, as well as Johnson&Johnson and the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organisation.

Do you have a use case, abstract or concrete, and would you like to be involved with the ERP or the dcypher roadmap at large? Make sure to sign up for our next convention on 19 January, where we will bring the entire ecosystem together again.