Background

Federated Mission Networking (FMN) is an international standard for collaboration between federated partners. Each partner operates a national information domain and the partners together maintain a shared information domain, including infrastructure services. One goal of the shared information domain is to establish a common recognized cyberspace picture (RCP). The RCP provides situational awareness about shared mission information, tasks, threat intelligence, incidents, and status of own, allied, and adversarial cyber assets. The RCPs are aggregated between partners and upwards the level of command. As the involved data is sensitive and often classified, there is a tension between expected benefits of sharing the data and risks in case of data leakage.

Goals of Thesis

The goal of this thesis is to explore how privacy-preserving technologies may be applied in an FMN context. Potentially useful technologies are privacy-preserving set operations, secure multi-party computation (MPC), or fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

Tasks include:

• Identify FMN aggregation tasks involving sensitive data
• Survey and assess potentially useful techniques that fit the identified aggregation tasks
• Design and implement privacy-preserving aggregation prototypes
• Evaluate the prototypes in terms of performance and how well they are suited for actual deployments
• Discuss the impact of using privacy-preserving techniques: Does it enable new use cases that would otherwise not be possible due to data protection legislation by partners?

Requirements

• Interest in cyber situational awareness
• Background on cryptography, in particular privacy-preserving technologies (PET)
• Implementation skills