Interview: Meet SEIP project!

SEIP project proposes a solution for enabling user’s communities to exchange data in a secure and trustworthy manner, even on public, permissionless blockchains! Find out more about the project in this interview with Marco Saltarella.

Could you please introduce yourself?

I am Marco Saltarella, Software Engineer at FINCONS’ IIR (International Institutions and Research) Business Unit, working in the R&D team. Since 2018 I am contributing to several European and Regional funded Research & Development projects (see papers: https://doi.org/10.1109/GIOTS.2019.8766369 and https://doi.org/10.1002/itl2.127) with a focus on IoT and Blockchain technologies, confidential data protection via new cryptographic techniques and GDPR compliance.

How did you hear about ONTOCHAIN?

We heard about ONTOCHAIN via the NGI newsletter and ONTOCHAIN website.

What motivated you to apply?

FINCONS GROUP is an IT Business Consulting company active in Europe since 1983, and R&D is a key asset to bring innovation in all business areas.

As part of the R&D strategy, we saw in NGI ONTOCHAIN an opportunity to further foster our Next Generation Internet vision of providing a trustworthy and human-centric secure information exchange.

How was the application process?

Pretty straightforward. We just had to prepare our proposal and fill in some administrative information.

Can you briefly explain your project and its contribution to the ONTOCHAIN software ecosystem?

SEIP (Service for Encrypted Information Provider) aims to support users’ communities in creating their private virtual blockchains on a public one, by exploiting novel asymmetric encryption techniques (CP-ABE) and credential-based approaches (W3C VCs), ensuring granular data access control and confidentiality of on-chain and off-chain data in a decentralized and scalable way.

SEIP aims to deliver a framework that will ensure granular data access control and confidentiality of data exchanged, both on-chain, and off-chain, in a decentralized and scalable fashion.

SEIP sets itself as a solution addressing the on-chain data management technical topic of NGI ONTOCHAIN 1st Open Call, enabling user’s communities to exchange data in a secure and trustworthy manner even on public, permissionless blockchains.

The ONTOCHAIN project is based on a co-development process, how can you benefit from an experience like this? And what type of synergies are you eager to explore with the other selected teams?

We are looking to cooperate with other teams to both achieve our objectives in ONTOCHAIN, as well as to extend our partner’s network and collaborate with them also in future opportunities. In ONTOCHAIN we are exploring possible synergies with other selected projects, to extend and maximize the impact of our solution and contribute as a valuable building block of the ONTOCHAIN framework, specifically addressing the Privacy-aware and Secure Data Exchange application protocol.

What are your expectations regarding the new software ecosystem that ONTOCHAIN will deliver, its contribution to the NGI priority areas, and benefits for end users?

ONTOCHAIN ambitious goal is to advance and federate blockchain and semantic technologies to enable a human-centred Internet fostering new opportunities in a new generation of decentralized applications, supporting values of openness, transparency, and privacy. ONTOCHAIN, and more generally the NGI initiative, is strategic to foster the EU strategies for citizens-centric networks and digital ecosystems.

Our project fully supports this vision and will specifically contribute to put ONTOCHAIN on the forefront of the research activities on blockchain technologies for issues related to confidentiality and granular data access control, thus empowering its users with tools for a blockchain supported trustworthy and secure information exchange.