Publications
Curtain Call for our Demonstrators: A Summary
One of our jobs at the C4DT Factory is to work on promising projects from our affiliated labs. This helps the faculties translate their research into formats accessible to different audiences. For a newly on-boarded project, we evaluate its current state and identify the required steps towards a final product.…
C4DT Conference: Deepfakes, Distrust and Disinformation: The Impact of AI on Elections and Public Perception
C4DT FOCUS 7 The Encryption Dilemma
Testing TLS in local development
TLS or Transport Layer Security is the cryptographic protocol that allows your internet connected devices to contact any website or any API or cloud service securely (over HTTPs). It adds privacy to your connection, by encrypting the transferred data, and more importantly helps your computer make sure that it’s talking…
Book Review: Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest To End Privacy As We Know It (2023)
Investigative journalist Kashmir Hill traces the rise and consequences of facial-recognition company Clearview AI on the future of privacy.
Observer 13 Ensuring Safety in AI Development through Greater Transparency
Empowering Digital Identities: The SSI Protocol Landscape
In this fourth part of the blog series “Swiss e-ID journey”, we give an overview of the Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) [10] landscape in CH, EU, and beyond. This allows the reader to put the current effort of the e-ID in context with international efforts in references and implementations regarding e-ID…
The Swiss Confederation E-ID Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure – Part 3
C4DT Demonstrator using the Swiss Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure This is our third article about the Swiss e-ID Journey. An overview of the system can be found in our first article, Switzerland’s e-ID journey so far [1a], and an introduction to the first steps of using the sandbox [8] in…
Secure, Transparent, and Verifiable Elections: The D-Voting Project
The d-voting project from the DEDIS lab at EPFL is a decentralized voting system that leverages blockchain technology and cryptographic algorithms to ensure secure, transparent, and verifiable elections. By using a blockchain as the storage medium, the system allows multiple entities to oversee the election process and enables easy access…
The Swiss Confederation E-ID Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure – Part 2
The Swiss E-ID Journey This article is the second in a series of three articles which discusses C4DT’s experiences and takeaways testing the Swiss Confederation Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure, hereafter abbreviated as “sandbox”. In the first article, we looked over all the components of the sandbox, and its setup. In…
Introducing D-Voting
Six years ago, EPFL rolled out an e-voting platform developed by Bryan Ford’s DEDIS lab for its internal elections [2]. The then newly-formed Center for Digital Trust (C4DT) brought this project as one of the first under the umbrella of its Digital-Trust Open Platform, the precursor to what is…
C4DT Insight #1: Welche Zukunft für den Service public im Zeitalter der digitalen Plattformen?
In diesem Policypaper gehen Matthias Finger und Melanie Kolbe-Guyot auf die Herausforderungen ein, die digitale Plattformen für die traditionellen Service public mit sich bringen. Sie schlagen handlungsfähige Strategien für politische Entscheidungsträger vor, um die Zugänglichkeit, Erschwinglichkeit und Nachhaltigkeit des bestehenden Service public zu gewährleisten.
C4DT Insight #1: What does the future hold for the service public in the digital platform era?
In this policy paper, Matthias Finger and Melanie Kolbe-Guyot unpack the challenges that digital platforms bring to traditional service public sectors. They suggest actionable strategies for policymakers to ensure accessibility, affordability, and sustainability of the existing physical service public offerings.
Book Review: Digital Empires. The Global Battle to Regulate Technology (2023)
This book offers an in-depth, objective analysis of the three dominant regulatory models for digitalization—market-driven by the US, state-driven by China, and citizen-driven by the EU—and their global impacts on data, digital platforms, and the internet, highlighting the current geo-political struggles and possible future scenarios.
The Swiss Confederation E-ID Public Sandbox Trust Infrastructure
Switzerland’s E-ID journey so far In 2021, the Swiss E-ID law proposition was rejected by a public referendum. The reason for the refusal was due to privacy concerns in the implementation and management of that system. In a nutshell, the idea that a private entity would be in control of…
C4DT Webinar: Implementation of Private Cloud based on Open-Source Cloud Stack
2023 Annual Report – C4DT
Book Review: Trafficking Data. How China is Winning the Battle for Digital Sovereignty (2023)
This book explores China's agenda to establish itself as a cyber superpower through their strategic data governance approach, which, the author Aynne Kokas suggests, could pose a threat to global data autonomy.
C4DT FOCUS 6 How does Big Tech keep us on the hook?
Observer 12 Cloud Computing Sovereignty in Switzerland
C4DT Factory Update “Ethical EOF 23.10”
For this Factory Update called “Ethical EOF” we invited Sylvain from Prof. Carmela Troncoso’s SPRING lab. He gave us an introduction to “Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE)”. We learnt how it can be used in privacy-preserving technologies (PET). Sylvain presented a use case to us which is federated learning. As FHE…
Archiving of Demos 2023
Part of the work of the C4DT Factory is the creation of demonstrators (proof of concepts) of technology coming out of the EPFL/IC labs. After two years we archive them and provide you with the means to easily run the demo on your computer instead. That way the demo remains…
Report: Digitaler Service Public Workshop
This report summarizes the key results of the 2. Workshop on Digital Service Public held with 20 stakeholders from Swiss public administration, politics, industry, interest groups, civil society and academia.
Working Paper: Digitaler Service Public
As part of our work on the digital public service in Switzerland, we have written an initial working paper in which we focused in particular on the question of the future of the traditional service public in the context of progressive platformization.