CertiCoLab was a project funded by the EEA Grants Fund for Bilateral Relations and promoted by NOVA.ID.FCT in partnership with the Simula UiB Research Laboratory. The collaboration involved several research visits between the two institutions during 2024 and aimed to investigate novel certifiable secure computation primitives.
The collaboration led to early-stage research on practical applications based on the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem. The project also aimed to continue to work towards making new developments in private set operations protocol, and in the area of building zero-knowledge authentication procedures based on real-world credentials.
The CertiCoLab project concluded in December 2024, with the hosting of Portugal Crypto Day. The event aimed to promote and showcase the range of research in cryptography performed by Portuguese and Portugal-based researchers.
The project included the following actions:
- Research visits: five research visits between the Department of Computer Science at NOVA FCT and Simula UiB, involving direct research collaboration, seminar talks, and networking between various members of the departments.
- Collaborative laboratory: ongoing research on various building blocks necessary for use in certifiable multi-party computation protocols. This research will be presented soon as preprints and submissions to conferences in the area of cryptography and information security. Furthermore, there is scope to continue working along these lines further between the two research units.
- Cryptography workshop: held the first Portugal Crypto Day workshop to bring together cryptographers with connections to Portugal to discuss their research and increase interconnection between the wider community of researchers in this geographic area. The idea is to continue this workshop annually, in different geographic regions.
As stated, the research lines and events organised are valuable starting points for increased collaboration between Simula UiB and Portuguese institutions in this scientific area. Furthermore, the project promoter believes that its results will help to bring the network of cryptography research in Portugal closer together, to increase and diversify scientific outputs.