Project PRACTICE comes to an end with excellent evaluation

The European project PRACTICE (Privacy-enhanced and Secure Computations on Potentially Malicious Clouds), where INESC TEC was one of the partners, represented by the High-Assurance Software Laboratory (HASLab), was concluded in 2016 with an excellent evaluation by the European Commission.

The goal of PRACTICE, a European project in the field of information security, was to develop cloud technologies that guarantee the privacy of data. Unlike existing solutions on the market, where cloud providers and other internal agents have indiscriminate access to their users' data, the PRACTICE technology prevents these unauthorised agents from having access to confidential information. This way, this technology processes the data in encrypted form, thus enhancing new business models that exploit the economic and technological benefits of the cloud.

As part of the project, the HASLab team created a formally verified secure computing infrastructure, which makes it possible to specify and safely analyse applications developed in the cloud, convert application components that manipulate private data into secure computing, and, finally, execute secure cloud computing using cryptographic protocols that guarantee total data privacy.

HASLab pioneered the development of highly efficient protocols that make it possible to delegate security guarantees to trusted hardware. An example of this is the protocol that is present in the most recent processors developed by Intel, an American multinational corporation and technology company.

This project had global funding of around € 7.5M and the last evaluation of the European Commission took place in December in Brussels, Belgium.