PROJECT OBJECTIVES

The objective of the PANORAMIX project is the development of a multipurpose infrastructure for privacy-preserving communications based on “mix-networks” (mix-nets) and its integration into high-value applications that can be exploited by European businesses. Mix-nets protect not only the content of communications from third parties, but also obscure the exact identity of the senders or receivers of messages, through the use of cryptographic relays. Mix-nets are absolutely necessary for implementing strong privacy-preserving systems and protocols.

This project directly aims to realize, integrate and demonstrate the use of a European infrastructure for mix-nets in the context of three diverse high-value applications that have clear, measurable, realistic, and achievable objectives.

In short, our objectives are:

1. Building a Mix-Net Infrastructure for Europe, by creating a European mix-network open-source codebase and infrastructure.

2. Mix-nets for Private Electronic Voting Protocols, where anonymity is necessary to guarantee ballot secrecy, and verifiability is needed for holding fair, transparent and trustworthy elections; our objective is to provide robust and verifiable private elections that scale up to 100K-1M ballots.

3. Mix-Nets for Privacy-aware Cloud Data-Handling, in the context of privacy-friendly surveying, statistics and big data gathering protocols, where protecting the identity of the surveyed users is necessary to elicit truthful answers and incentivize participation; our objective is to support private gathering to compile real time traffic maps or other smart city big data about 1M-5M updates daily.

4. Mix-Nets for Privacy-preserving Messaging, where two or more users may communicate privately without third parties being able to track what is said or who-is-talking-to- whom; our objective is to support private messaging that scales to 90K-200K users, in-line with the needs to serve the existing user base of existing email/VPN providers and project partners Greenhost (GH) and the Center for the Cultivation of Technology (CCT).

WORK PACKAGES

WP1 contains all tasks relating to the administrative and financial management of the project, reporting requirements, communication between partners, decision-making processes, quality assurance and innovation management.

WP2 includes all tasks related to dissemination of project results, standardisation of project technical standards developed, licensing of the open-source mix-net infrastructure developed, and industry exploitation of project results.

In WP3 we investigate and propose technology options, with analysis and early evidence for building mix-nets that serve the needs of the pilot use-cases.

WP4 pulls all the technologies (mix-net specifications, zero-knowledge and differential privacy methods) from WP3 to build a mix-net that may be customized to serve the purposes of the use cases of WP5, WP6 and WP7.

WP5 will deliver an e-voting service supporting large scale elections up to hundreds of thousands of voters on top of the mix-net infrastructure developed in WP4.

WP6 applies the Panoramix mix-net from WP4 in a cloud service personal data collection and processing application.

In WP7 we will integrate the mix-net infrastructure developed in WP4 into the generic open-source LEAP email client as a routing option that preserves the privacy and security of email.