Trustworthy computing – data sovereignty while connected

Jointly use data without sharing it – a vision born in the early 80s after Andrew C. Yao published his seminal work on Protocols for Secure Computations– is approaching reality thanks to major advances in cryptography. Our research on trustworthy computing aims to lift this technology into the cloud and provide Bosch customers with new levels of data security and privacy.

Bosch has committed itself to high ethical standards when handling its customers’ data. In our research on trustworthy computing, we strive to complement these ethical guidelines – called the Bosch IoT Principles – with technology built to live up to these standards. At the heart of this endeavor is the belief that people should be able to exert control over their data. Bosch Research is working on making this data sovereignty possible in the Security and Privacy Enhanced Computing Services (SPECS) division.

These breakthroughs rely on end-to-end data protection that keeps data safe from unauthorized access throughout the whole data life cycle – in transit, at rest and in use. The underlying cryptographic techniques are called secure multiparty computation (MPC) and homomorphic encryption. Both have a long history in the academic world, but until recently their limited efficiency has largely prevented industrial application.

Today, performance is no longer the major inhibitor for real-world use. For that reason, our research at the intersection of cryptography and distributed systems now focuses on removing other barriers to industrial application. In this way we want to create truly practicable, scalable, and dependable solutions that are ready to prove their mettle in highly demanding application domains such as the automotive industry.

Bosch Research can rely on an established network of innovative partners when overcoming the associated challenges. For example, there is currently a collaboration with the start-ups Edgeless Systems and Aircloak within the context of the Open Bosch program. Within this collaboration, Bosch Research and the start-ups are working together on a system for analyzing workshop data while maintaining privacy and trade secrets.

The start-up Edgeless Systems is using Trusted Execution Environments as the basis for the development of a scalable solution for protecting data during processing. Here, a special feature of modern processors ensures that the data itself is not accessible to system administrators. The second start-up, Aircloak, is developing a filter which can be set up around a database and which ensures that no information that would allow conclusions to be drawn about the data subjects leaves the database. “We are combining both technologies and thus achieve a level of protection that is unique in data analysis,” explains Sven Trieflinger of Bosch Research.