Bronze at the German IT Security Award for Bosch Research project Carbyne Stack

Carbyne is the hardest known material on earth. A fitting name for the Carbyne Stack IT project initiated by Bosch Research. Because it promises to become one of the most secure methods of exchanging data in open systems like clouds. In November 2022, the project was among the winners of the German IT Security Award.

Computing on Encrypted Data (CoED) technologies keep data encrypted during processing. One of these cryptographic methods is Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC). In combination with other encryption methods for data at rest and in transit, it can be used to protect confidential information throughout its lifecycle: during processing, transmission, and storage. In digital services, for example, the service provider never gains insight into client data in this way.

In a project on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET), Bosch research experts Sven Trieflinger and Sebastian Becker are now creating the basis for applying these technologies in cloud computing, where many parties jointly compute on their sensitive data or intellectual property without a need to disclose it to each other. Their approach: to combine special MPC methods with cloud-native technologies. Their solution: Carbyne Stack allows collaboration infrastructure to be set up in a scalable way, for example for large companies or research projects. One of the next development goals for Carbyne Stack is to establish an ecosystem with other partners to jointly develop the technology further. Not least for this reason, Carbyne Stack is set up as an open-source solution that should be accessible to as many users as possible. An exemplary application would be to precisely model a supply chain of several partners without the companies involved having to provide internal data in unencrypted form.

Carbyne Stack is currently the only IT solution in Europe that combines MPC with cloud-native methods in an open-source project. The fact that the project makes data security and data sovereignty generally accessible was one of the reasons why Carbyne Stack was among the winners of the German IT Security Award this year.