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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.

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.

MedCo: EPFL software to enable secure data-sharing for hospitals

The MedCo system – developed in the Laboratory  for Data Security (LDS) of Jean-Pierre Hubaux, academic director of C4DT, in collaboration with the Lausanne University Hospital CHUV – aims to facilitate medical research on pathologies, such as cancer and infectious diseases, by enabling secure computations on decentralized data. The unique software has recently been deployed at three Swiss hospitals, CHUV, HUG and Inselspital in Bern. 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.

Coronavirus and data, what surveillance?

Debate between Jean-Pierre Hubaux, professor at EPFL, academic director of C4DT and head of the data security laboratory, Antoine Flahault, epidemiologist, director of the Institute of Global Health of the University of Geneva and Aude Marcovitch, RTS journalist.

Jean-Pierre Hubaux, talks about data monitoring in the fight against Covid-19, in the March 25 programme Forum on RTS.
Please click below to access the broadcast.

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 (…)

C4DT interviewed by “24Heures” on the Crypto AG scandal

In the wake of the recent Crypto Ag scandal, French-language news paper ’24Heures’ interviewed Jean-Pierre Hubaux, professor at EPFL, academic director of the Center for Digital Trust, on his insights on data protection and on the scandal’s impact on our trust in the digital world.

Read the article in French on www.24heures.ch or by accessing the pdf through the following link.

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. (…)

Crypto Valley Conference 2020

The 3rd edition of the Crypto Valley Conference will be held on On June 11-12 in Rotkreuz, Switzerland, with two days of in-depth discussions on the current state and future of blockchain technology.

More information will follow shortly. To access the event’s website, click below.

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 (…)

C4DT mentioned in “Le Temps” as an initiative against cybercrime

Initiatives against cybercrime, online harassment or spying are increasing at an impressive rate. Switzerland wants to position itself as a world center of excellence. French-language news paper ‘Le Temps’ asked Olivier Crochat, executive director of the Center for Digital Trust, about the center’s focus.

Read the article in French on www.letemps.ch or by accessing the pdf through the following link.

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. (…)

C4DT partner login through OmniLedger

C4DT is working on bringing software from the labs to the real world. As part of this effort, we’re working on implementing use-cases for OmniLedger. OmniLedger is a novel blockchain that offers several new features. For example it works as a decentralised login service. This means that there is no central service deciding on who (…)

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 (…)