What is the problem/issue being addressed?
The financial sector and its users need to be able to rely on the integrity and accountability of financial services as a societally critical infrastructure. Irregular and unaccountable financial transactions, cyber threats, non-user-friendly inefficient or impractical banking processes, complex contracting procedures and cumbersome financial market and insurance infrastructures constitute an obstacle to European open market development. The advent of Blockchain technology, the rapidly evolving internet-enabled financial services, in particular mobile money and crypto-currency-based services, and the ever-increasing threats of cyber-attacks and fraudulent transactions constitute a major challenge to which the European financial sector needs to respond supported by technological innovation that can be readily integrated with the existing legacy systems.
Why is it important for society?
The fast emerging evolution of blockchain enabled and crypto-currencies based financial services operating within an open banking environment that is vulnerable to cyber threats and fraudulent transactions provides a pressing need for to technological solutions to support the cyber security and integrity of the traditional financial services sector as well as the new blockchain and crypto and mobile money services. This is to be accompanied by new regulatory responses to the emerging operational environment within which to protect the traditional banking sector as well as the citizens as the users of financial services.
What are the overall objectives?
Critical-Chains responsible and responsive innovation objectives are to deliver:
A novel triangular accountability model and integrated framework supporting accountable, effective, accessible, fast, secure and privacy-preserving financial contracts and transactions to protect against illicit transactions, illegal money trafficking and fraud on FinTech e-operations.
This is an innovative cloud-based “X-as-a Service” solution stack including several layers:
1) Data integrity checking by involving financial institutions in the distributed Blockchain network;
2) Transaction and financial data flows analytics, modelling and mining;
3) Threat Intelligence & Predictive Modelling for Inter-Banks and Internet Banking, insurance and financial market infrastructures;
4) Multi-lateral Biometric-based and Role-based Authorisation & Authentication;
5) Hardware Security Module (HSM) enabled Cyber-Physical Security, embedded systems & IoT security for secure access using Security-Privacy-Contexts Semantic Modelling;
6) Secure and smart use of Blockchain services based on keyless signature infrastructure and hybrid (a)symmetric cryptography utilising truly random key generation.
