Building a secure and human-centred digital future for Europe
Data-driven tech has the potential to improve the quality of life of all Europeans. However, while digital identity and data sharing may play a key role in Europe’s digital future, there are still important security, privacy and trust barriers to overcome. These barriers involve identity theft, data leakage, AI-related privacy risks and limited trust in cross-border data sharing. The TrustED(opens in new window) project is addressing these obstacles by developing a secure and interoperable digital identity solution that enables secure data collaboration across data spaces. TrustED’s privacy-by-design framework combines self-sovereign digital identity with trustworthy data analytics, allowing citizens and organisations to collaborate with other organisations while maintaining the privacy and trust of all those involved. The framework integrates the EU Digital Identity Wallet, a secure digital app through which users can prove their identity and share verified personal data across borders. Other core features include privacy-preserving federated learning (data analysis takes place without sharing raw data), dataset discoverability through data spaces, and advanced privacy-enhancing technologies, or PETs, such as zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption and differential privacy. Such features are designed to protect data privacy while still allowing efficient computation and trustworthy verification.
Real-world applications
The project team recently tested its technology in two main use cases. The first one was a self-sovereign identity wallet for volunteers and NGOs designed to manage digital credentials in a secure and user-friendly way. In this testing, TrustED researchers analysed how users interact with the tool when creating a verifiable identity credential, generating a volunteer credential and presenting these credentials to NGOs. In the following months, the team will focus on implementing improvements to the volunteers’ verifiable credential flows with ad hoc web interfaces. They will also work on integration with a minimum viable data space, allowing volunteers to access a dashboard listing volunteering activities or opportunities made available by NGOs in the data space. The second use case involved federated learning for secure analysis of clinical data. In this pilot, the researchers evaluated the TrustED federated learning platform, focusing on how it could support secure and collaborative clinical research in real hospital environments. The aim was to understand whether the platform fits with existing clinical research workflows, whether its governance and approval processes are appropriate, and how trustworthy stakeholders consider its federated learning operations to be. The team will now work on integrating the data space components, an organisational wallet in charge of authenticating participants in the data space, the federated learning service and the portal granting access to participants. “Our mission at TrustED is to develop solutions that enable users and organisations to extract the maximum potential from data, while ensuring privacy, within the new paradigm of European data spaces,” comments Jaime Loureiro Acuña, Head of Advanced Data Security at Gradiant, the organisation coordinating the project. By delivering practical tools and methods that help organisations design, deploy and assess digital technologies with higher levels of security, reliability, accountability and user trust, TrustED (Enabling Trustworthy European Data Spaces through Self-Sovereign Identity and Privacy Preserving Technologies) is contributing towards a more trustworthy, transparent and human-centred digital ecosystem. If you are interested in having your EU-funded project featured as a ‘Project of the Month’, please send us an email to editorial@cordis.europa.eu and tell us why!
