Trust and Security in Numbers

The fellowship will examine the science, technology and application of Multi-Party Computation technology in various application domains. MPC is a long standing theoretical construct, which is only now becoming practically realisable. It has the potential to revolutionize the way we enable trust in our computing infrastructure (by distributing trust amongst different parties). It will enable greater privacy aware applications, (by enabling parties to compute on data without holding it `in the clear'), and it will ensure greater security (by providing robust and secure protocols for tasks currently performed in an insecure and ad-hoc manner). It can also enable new business models and applications by allowing parties who currently do not share data resources, to share the said resources without compromising on either privacy or security. The research programme covers a pipeline of work covering the lower TRL levels. We will conduct basic scientific research in the underlying mathematics and protocols, we will conduct research in the systems engineering needed to bring such protocols to an efficient reality, including work on programming tools and models, and finally we will examine potential applications via demonstrators and our industrial advisory board (all of whome have been selected due to their long term interaction with our group and their expertise in specific application domains of MPC).