PRIVA-SIQ

PRIVA-SIQ (Privacy-preserving secure communications despite subversions, interceptions, and quantum adversaries)

Secure channels are essential for interactive communications -- over the Internet, in secure payments, mobile communications, or IoT communications – and non-interactive ones – such as secure messaging. Unfortunately, whereas protocol-security is at the forefront of today’s digital communications, much less interest has been paid to user privacy. Yet, user-privacy is a fundamental human right – and in fact much more fragile than security in the context of communications.

Threats to user-privacy in secure-channel establishment abound, at all levels. In this project, our goal is to specifically tackle the following threats:

- Interception: Privacy with respect to person-in-the-middle adversaries (exterior to the communication and aiming to track, deanonymize, or identify an endpoint of the channel);

- Subversion: Providing privacy-enhancing countermeasures against mass-surveillance attacks; 

- Quantum adversaries: Designing protocols that preserve both user-privacy and security against powerful quantum adversaries.