Public services (as all others) are reaching the Digital Single Market (DSM). Secure and respectful electronic identity (eID) management is an important enabler for trust and confidence in the DSM. Emerging technologies can disrupt eID and have strong potential for empowering existing initiatives. In particular, IMPULSE focuses on 2 of the most promising and disruptive technologies nowadays: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain, and their contributions to and impacts on eID. IMPULSE will carry out a user-centric and multidisciplinary impact analysis on the integration of Blockchain and AI on eID in public services, evaluating benefits but also risks, costs and limitations, considering socio-economic, legal, ethical and operational impacts, together with framework conditions (like GDPR and eIDAS regulations, existing eID systems, and standards). IMPULSE will use a demand-driven co-creation process as the guide, including pilot-oriented operational experimentation and involving Digital Innovation Hubs. A set of 6 representative and innovative case studies in Denmark, Spain, Bulgaria, Iceland and Italy, led by public service partner, will provide a variety of cultural, operational, legal, procedural and social contexts for research. Two major outcomes will be produced: 1) Holistic AI and blockchain technology supporting GDPR-compliant eID to complement existing EU identity schemas, ensuring cross-border access and secure and adaptable requirements for actionable integration with other public service providers, and adoption by existing Trust Service Providers (TSP) to ensure marketability. 2) Actionable roadmaps (detailing pathways and good practices) for the adoption, escalation and sustainability of such advanced eID technologies by public services in the EU ecosystem, in different countries and at different levels (local, regional, national and cross-border), as well as recommendations for policy makers supporting political accountability and responsibility.

PRESENT is a proposal for a three-year Research and Innovation project to create virtual digital companions––embodied agents––that look entirely naturalistic, demonstrate emotional sensitivity, can establish meaningful dialogue, add sense to the experience, and act as trustworthy guardians and guides in the interfaces for AR, VR and more traditional forms of media. There is no higher quality interaction than the human experience when we use all our senses together with language and cognition to understand our surroundings and––above all—to interact with other people. We interact with today’s ‘Intelligent Personal Assistants’ primarily by voice; communication is episodic, based on a request-response model. The user does not see the assistant, which does not take advantage of visual and emotional clues or evolve over time. However, advances in the real-time creation of photorealistic computer generated characters, coupled with emotion recognition and behaviour, and natural language technologies, allow us to envisage virtual agents that are realistic in both looks and behaviour; that can interact with users through vision, sound, touch and movement as they navigate rich and complex environments; converse in a natural manner; respond to moods and emotional states; and evolve in response to user behaviour. PRESENT will create and demonstrate a set of practical tools, a pipeline and APIs for creating realistic embodied agents and incorporating them in interfaces for a wide range of applications in entertainment, media and advertising. The international partnership includes the Oscar-winning VFX company Framestore; technology developers Brainstorm, Cubic Motion and IKinema; Europe’s largest certification authority InfoCert; research groups from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Universität Augsburg and Inria; and the pioneers of immersive virtual reality performance CREW.

KRAKEN Secure and privacy preserving platform (broKeRage And marKEt platform for persoNal data) aims to bring personal data sharing and trading at a level of maturity that does not yet exist, by leveraging on: i) the emerging paradigm of self-sovereign identity built upon a stack of distributed ledger technologies (multi-ledger) which ensures future compatibility with different specific blockchain implementations for identity management. It will provide a decentralized user-centric approach on personal data sharing and proving that it can incorporate the trust and security assurance levels deriving claims from national identity schemas (eIDAS-compliant); ii) tested data marketplace technologies which support data sharing as well as aggregated data sharing; iii) A set of different data protection techniques based on advanced crypto tools (P/F/HE, FE, MPC, ABE…) coupled with privacy preserving (AI/ML) analytics, featuring management of privacy / utility trade-offs and metadata privacy. iv) The project will provide market-ready tools and services with industrial strength and suitable privacy metrics that will be conveyed to data subjects with high usability. Taking advantages of the emergent models and lessons learned from previous experiences, including existing and mature cloud-based personal data platforms CREDENTIAL and MHMD, as well as Streamr marketplace services, Kraken proposes an unprecedented approach, which creates an alternative to mainstream paradigms while fully granting the privacy and self-sovereignity of the data subject. KRAKEN enables advanced, convenient data sharing control relying on innovative end-to-end encryption and use of sophisticated proxy cryptography schemes grants data subjects with unprecedented control over their data. Furthermore, this ensures that even the cloud provider (data processor) cannot access the data in plain-text and hence protect access to personal data. KRAKEN involves 10 partners and has a duration of 3 years.

With increasing mobility and Internet usage, the demand for digital services increases and has reached critical and high assurance domains like e-Government, e-Health and e-Business. Those domains have high security and privacy requirements and hence will be harnessed with various novel mechanisms for secure access. Approaches for handling the resulting variety of authentication and authorisation mechanisms include the use of digital identity and access management systems (IAM). Like other technologies IAMs follow the trend of using cloud services. This allows abstracting over used resources and enables ubiquitous access to identity data which is stored and processed in the cloud, but also results in an additional degree of complexity for securely operating IAMs. The goal of CREDENTIAL is to develop, test and showcase innovative cloud based services for storing, managing, and sharing digital identity information and other critical personal data. The security of these services relies on the combination of strong hardware-based multi-factor authentication with end-to-end encryption representing a significant advantage over current password-based authentication schemes. The use of sophisticated proxy cryptography schemes will enable a secure and privacy preserving information sharing network for cloud-based identity information in which even the identity provider cannot access the data in plain-text and hence protect access to identity data. We focus not only on evaluating and applying novel crypto-approaches for IAMs but also on implementing them in an easy-to-use way to motivate secure handling of identity data. In order to also address security, privacy and trust issues related to the used cloud platforms and services we will investigate assurance and resilience approaches for enhancing underlying cloud services. To empirically evaluate our work and to produce outputs of a high technical readiness we will consider use cases from all three domains mentioned above.

RESCALE aims at designing, building, and demonstrating secure-by-design supply chains. To this end, RESCALE will (i) automate the evaluation processes of both software and hardware components, (ii) ensure that third-party segments are free from vulnerabilities, (iii) offer effective audit procedures for cybersecurity testing, and (iv) enable the construction of secure systems with the strongest possible guarantees. Overall, RESCALE will systematically analyse and extend, as necessary, every hardware and software layer in a computing system and apply novel tools and methodologies at every step of the entire supply chain.