Agency

The founding General Assembly of C4DT was held on Friday, 2 November, in presence of the President of EPFL, Martin Vetterli, and of 50 guests. The 12 partners of the Center said they are keen to apply research to their business needs and regulatory requirements, at a time when digitalization is affecting their mission. EPFL professors then underlined the potential for improvements in digital protection and security.

The International Red Cross (ICRC) is confronted to unique information-security challenges when providing aid to disaster victims. A group of C4DT-affiliated researchers has been closely working with ICRC to better understand specific computer security challenges. For that work, Steven Leblond and his colleagues led by professors Ford and Hubaux were awarded the Distinguished Best Paper Award at the 39th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco.

Byzen and C4DT-affiliated DEDIS laboratory collaborated to implement DEDIS's onChain secrets service. This technology can be used to re-encrypt the most sensitive of data and ensure that any reads to that data are validated, via a distributed and consensus driven decryption process.

MedCo, developed in the lab of EPFL professor Jean-Pierre Hubaux in collaboration with professor Bryan Ford’s DEDIS lab and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), is the first operational system to protect sensitive patient data – including genetic information – so that it can be used collectively for crucial medical research.

More than one million families are separated due to conflicts. The ICRC and the EPFL through C4DT partnership have set themselves a challenge to analyse publicly available data through analytics techniques to identify missing persons that would arguably not have been identified using current, conventional methods. The goal of this project is to facilitate the search for missing individuals by building scalable, accurate systems tailored for that purpose.