INESC-ID’s research and innovation activities on Security & Privacy span over 20 years. In recent times, we have been particularly active supporting the European Commission, the Portuguese government, public entities and national companies in developing public policies and technological solutions for improving the security and privacy aspects of their presence on the Internet.

Our knowledge on Security & Privacy covers a set of intersecting disciplines (cybersecurity, information security, privacy, trust, risk, identity, decentralization, cryptography, trusted computing) and is present in most of our scientific areas (computer systems, electronic systems, information systems, intelligent systems, etc.). We combine top theoretical research published in major conferences and journals, with practice in consulting and collaborating with organizations that need our expertise.

Recently, our team has achieved significant milestones in various topics. We have introduced a new high-performance censorship-resistant communication solution with strong traffic analysis resistance. Moreover, we developed several mechanisms to protect web and cloud applications, both by inspecting plus correcting their code and by transparently blocking cyberattacks in runtime in the database. We also designed a provably secure, quantum-resistant, direct anonymous attestation mechanism, leveraging lattice-based cryptography. Other highlights concern speeding up the execution of machine learning over encrypted data using fully homomorphic encryption and cryptographic solutions for privacy preserving speech mining. We have a unique understanding of the benefits and limitations of TrustZone as a mechanism to protect mobile and IoT applications. These accomplishments represent only a fraction of our recent research.