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Matrix on Mobile with OmniLedger login

For some time it was impossible to use the c4dt matrix chat on the mobile phones, as RiotX didn’t work correctly with the OmniLedger login. Now you can use the Element app together with our login to have matrix chat on your phone. TL;DR Of course you just want to know how it works: Add (…)

SPRING lab developed a secure, decentralized search engine for journalists

The C4DT-affiliated SPRING laboratory has developed Datashare Network, a decentralized search engine paired with a secure messaging system that allows investigative journalists to exchange information securely and anonymously. An scientific article on this subject will be presented during the Usenix Security Symposium which will be held online from August 12 to 14. For more information access EPFL’s announcement below.

Roche joins the C4DT

We are proud to announce that Roche has just joined the C4DT as partner. Its arrival adds the pharmaceutical industry to the already broad field of economic sectors represented within the C4DT. We are convinced that this partnership will add new perspectives and insights to digital trust and lead to fruitful collaborations among the partners and the affiliated laboratories.

C4DT online workshop on discussing a selection of EPFL COVID-19 projects

The EPFL COVID-19 academic committee has given the green light to twenty research projects directly addressing the COVID-19 crisis. In their research, teams from all the Schools work on priority aspects of the pandemic: preventing or tracking contagion, cure and vaccines, diagnostics and testing, and policy and data. In this workshop we will present a selection of 5 to the C4DT community and discuss potential collaboration.

For more information about this event please click below.

C4DT panel discussion on Quantum Safety

The C4DT organizes a panel discussion on Quantum safety – security against quantum attacks. It aims to establish a common understanding of quantum terminology, to grasp the concrete risks from quantum computing faced by companies, and to raise awareness among leaders to prepare enterprises now for a secure future. Among the panelists are Dr. Tommaso Gagliardoni, Kudelski Security, Dr. Dimitar Jetchev, Inpher, Dr. Grégoire Ribordy, ID Quantique and Dr. Juan Troncoso-Pastoriza, EPFL.

September 16th, 2020, 16:00-19:00 @ EPFL, 1014 Ecublens, Switzerland. Please note that this event is for the C4DT community only. Please contact david.viollier@epfl.ch for more information.

C4DT Webinar on Critical Infrastructures in Switzerland: are they crisis-resilient?

In times of crises, we become acutely aware how important infrastructures are as a basis for society to continue to function … and to recover in the aftermath. But this is not only the question of the importance of foundational infrastructures, such as telecom, postal services, public transport and electricity, it is also the question of their resilience. In this webinar, we will discuss these questions for the case of Switzerland, together with representatives of the major Swiss infrastructure providers – Swissgrid, SBB, Swiss Post and Swisscom. The webinar will be introduced and moderated by Prof. Matthias Finger, Swiss Post Chair in Management of Network Industries at EPFL and will benefit from the critical view of a representative of the Swiss Confederation in charge of the national security network.

Wednesday, June 2nd, 10:30-12:00, remote.

For more information click below.

C4DT Webinar on SwissCovid (DP^3T project) – a proximity-tracing app against COVID-19: building trust in a technology solution

The collaborative development effort, called DP-3T (Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing), involves researchers from various countries and is led from EPFL by C4DT-affiliated privacy expert Prof. Carmela Troncoso. Its goal is to simplify and accelerate the process of identifying people who have been in contact with an infected person, thus providing a technological foundation to help slow the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. During this public webinar, we will discuss how the application works as well as how to build trust to encourage the population to adopt a technology solution.

May 27th, 10:30 – 12:30, remote.

For more information click below.

Covid-19: SICPA works towards an immunological passport for the sick

Three companies, including Sicpa,  have imagined a mobile application for the patients to certify that a person has been infected. Responding to a call for projects from the French Ministry of Defence, a consortium of three companies (Sicpa, OpenHealth and Guardtime) has just proposed a first turnkey solution. For more information click below to read the article which appeared in the French journal ‘Le Journal du Dimanche’.

C4DT’s Lead Developer participates at LauzHack Against COVID-19

C4DT’s lead developer, Linus Gasser, participated in last weekend’s LauzHack Against COVID-19, which is a 72h online hackathon dedicated to fighting the coronavirus crisis, to develop an app called Indie-Pocket. It uses various sensor data from the smartphone and a supervised classification technique to decipher in which pocket/body location the smartphone is located at that time. This inference will help measure distance between people’s phones via Bluetooth as part of EPFL’s privacy-preserving proximity tracking work, an EPFL project referred to as PEPP-PT. For more information, click below.

MedCo: Swiss software will analyse the hospital data, a valuable aid against the virus

Developed in the Laboratory for Data Security (LDS) headed by Professor Jean-Pierre Hubaux at EPFL, in collaboration with the Centre hospitalier universitaire vaudois (CHUV), the MedCo software allows hospitals to make calculations on the data they collectively have at their disposal without transferring or decrypting it. Please click below for more info.

Coronavirus: an app that warns of a risky contact, several C4DT labs involved.

A consortium of European researchers, including several from EPFL and C4DT, has developed the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) application, which should enable everyone to be informed if they have been in contact with a coronavirus carrier while guaranteeing anonymity. The aim is to develop a totally anonymous monitoring and alert protocol based on Bluetooth technology. Please click below to read the article in French.

Exploring golang with a REPL

It is customary for users familiar with a command-line shell or dynamic languages such as Python to work with a REPL, or Read-Eval-Print-Loop. This kind of interface is very powerful for common exploratory tasks: quickly interact with some data or object, prototype an idea, or learn a particular functionality or library. Unfortunately, static languages such (…)

RegHorizon’s AI Policy Conference

Following the postponement of conference, the new dates have been confirmed: 16-17th of November 2020. Wide application of AI technologies has enormous benefits, but it also presents unprecedented challenges in terms of privacy, cybersecurity, consumer rights and ethics. As societal expectations evolve, lack of clear global rules & slow pace of policy developments in this area presents a major challenge to businesses worldwide. RegHorizon’s AI Policy Conference is organized in collaboration with the ETHZ and will focus mainly on the role policy frameworks can play for AI’s future development. For more information please click below.

November 16th & 17th, 2020, 14h-19h online

C4DT technical training on Drynx library

C4DT’s Factory provides a hands-on technical training for C4DT partners on a library called Drynx. Drynx allows to create privacy-preserving queries on encrypted datasets that are stored at different data providers who don’t want to share the original data. Please note that this event is for C4DT partners only.
For more information and to access the program, please click below…

March 6th, 2020, 09:00-16:00 @ EPFL Building BC (room to be confirmed), 1014 Ecublens, Switzerland.

golang code analysis

To ensure good code quality, we are looking this week at some golang (one of the language used for many of our project at C4DT) helping us to do so. Some idea where taken from the Awesome Go List, a good reference for everything related to golang. First, we show some “classic” golang tools used (…)

Crypto in Angular and Nativescript

Using typescript and npm has two big advantages: there are many modules available, and it runs in many environments. Unfortunately this is also one of the biggest challenges. Because you can configure every aspect of the system, you can break it very easily. At C4DT we often use the crypto library, or the crypto-browserify counterpart. (…)

CYD and EPFL launch the CYD Fellowships

Cyber-threats have been accelerating due to the exponential growth of network connectivity. These new capabilities provide myriad opportunities for security hackers to wreak significant damage for commercial, political, or other gains. To promote research and education in cyber-defence, EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, and the Cyber-Defence (CYD) Campus have jointly launched the “CYD Fellowships” – a talent program for cyber-defence research.

CYD Fellowships are designed to promote new solutions to major challenges in the fields of security and data science by bringing together basic and applied research and supported by armasuisse Science and Technology.

Please click below for the official EPFL announcement.

Kubernetes

Want to automate pretty much every aspect of a deployed application lifespan? Having issue with reliability using docker-compose? Doesn’t want to care/handle how to expose this application to the outside? Want to have a reproducible infrastructure of containers deployed in a fast and resilient manner? Then Kubernetes is for you. In a word, it’s a (…)

traefik: a powerful reverse proxy

In a systems infrastructure, it is common that a single physical hosts presents many different services to the world. For example, one can have https://app1.my.domain/ and https://app2.my.domain/ point to the same host, whereas the actual services inside the organization reside on different physical or virtual machines. A typical way to handle this is to use (…)

On the road to general quantum computers

From an engineering point of view, quantum computers are very interesting beasts. It’s something new, shiny, you don’t understand it, but it seems to be the future. So you must go there! This is a collection of links that I found very helpful in understanding how quantum computers work and what they can do. First (…)

Monday Meeting Sharings

Every Monday the C4DT Factory team comes together for a meet’n share. Somebody from the team presents something he saw on the internet that is somewhat related to the work we’re doing. This can be technical, organisational, recreational (we didn’t have the “best cat pics” yet). Here is a list of the subjects we had (…)

Calypso

Calypso is an auditable data-management framework that allows decentralize sharing and life-cycle management of private data. It is describe in this paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/209.pdf. We use Calypso to store private data on the blockchain. DARCs describe the access to this private data. We use it in an example game of rock-paper-scissors in our example mobile application. (…)

Decentralized Access Rights Control – DARC

Current access rights management systems always depend on a centralized authority that all members must trust. However, for blockchains, this is not a good solution. Blockchains are decentralized and cannot easily use centralized trust systems. We built DARCs, a group-management on steroids that allows decentralized administration and delegation of identities. It is used in the (…)