Publications

On our C4DT publications page, you will find a wealth of information on our latest research in the digital trust space. Our publications are organized into different categories, including Focus, Observers, Public Events, Annual Report, Factory and Digital Governance and Policy.

Factory blog posts

The C4DT Factory team proposes technical blog posts on digital trust topics

Get a PET for X-Mas

Privacy Enhancing Technologies, or PETs for short, is an umbrella term for a wide range of technologies and tools designed to protect our privacy online. You may not realize it, but you probably already use PETs on a daily basis. Some common examples [1] include HTTPS, securing connections between you and websites End-to-end encryption, ensuring (...)

E-ID hands-on Workshop

We’re thrilled to share the success of our recent hands-on workshop on crafting more privacy-preserving E-IDs! In the morning, Imad Aad from C4DT set the stage with an insightful overview of the importance of E-IDs and the essentials for ensuring their effectiveness. The afternoon sessions, led by Linus Gasser and Ahmed Elghareeb, were a deep dive (...)

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. We may then also (...)

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 to the right server, and (...)

Pitfalls in Fine-Tuning LLMs

On the 19th of June 2024 the C4DT Factory organized a hands-on workshop to show what can go wrong when Large Language Models (LLMs) are fine-tuned. It was a pleasure working with our partners from armasuisse, FOITT (BIT), ELCA, ICRC, Kudelski Security, SICPA, Swiss Post, and Swissquote. LLMs take the world by storm, but for (...)

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 systems. You can read the (...)

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 our second article, The Swiss (...)

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 for public verifiers to ensure (...)

Digital Governance and Policy

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.

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.

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.

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.

Issue Brief: International Rulemaking for Tech

In this issue brief, C4DT Digital Trust Policy Fellow Leonila Guglya examines international digital product regulations that are of key relevance to the ICT community, such as mandatory disclosure of source code, use of cryptography, cybersecurity standards, and nondiscrimination rules.