Henrich C. Pöhls presented PRISMACLOUD's view on the key challenges with a focus on building secure and privacy-friendly cloud services at the ICT 2015 in Lisbon on 22. Oct. 2015. PRISMACLOUD wants to innovate and implement cryptographic techniques and make them available for developers to build cryptographically secured cloud services. The work ahead includes cryptographic innovations as well as building the libraries and guides for their usage to enable a fast adoption.
The networking session included presentations from Ghassan Karame (from TREDISEC) and Nicolas McDonnel (from WITDOM) and was moderated by Silvana Muscella (from WISER). From the presentations and the following panel discussion it became clear that the cryptographic tools are ripe to be used and applied. WITDOM made clear that we need to measure the need for privacy to select and adequate crypto. Also TREDISEC's presentation highlighted various cryptographic techniques, like secure multi party computation, and pointed out that these shall be applied to remove the need to trust the cloud. The panel and the audience, which actively participated, gained the consensus that privacy and security must be considered to increase the trust in cloud services. Of course this requires standardisation and legal frameworks harmonising the domain across the EU. A further remark was that the EU shall foster the development of trustworthy hardware components, as even with soundly implemented cryptographic primitives in place there is always a component that you need to trust, e.g. to generate or store your keys securely.
PRISMACLOUD was very happy about the enlightening discussions and plans to collaborate and exchange ideas and solutions with TREDISEC and WITDOM in the future.

PRISMACLOUD presentation: Verifiability and Authenticity of Data and Beyond

TREDISEC presentation: Data protection versus storage efficiency and multi-tenancy

WITDOM presentation: Cloud challenges to high-demanding privacy scenarios