University of Turku is one of seven international partners in the new Horizon Europe project PRIVIDEMA. The project is an industry-led initiative to advance privacy-preserving technologies in the areas of cyber threat intelligence, privacy and identity management.
The PRIVIDEMA project, which started in November 2024, received more than €3 million in funding from the European Commission's Horizon Europe programme for the next three years. The University of Turku's share of the funding is over €450 000.
The overall goal of the PRIVIDEMA project is to introduce stronger, and more user-friendly and scalable privacy and security technologies for the European ecosystem, to advance cyber-resilient digitalization and help the data economy grow in Europe. The project is working to improve cyber security, data and network protection and to build strong digital infrastructures.
– Following the European Digital Identity (EUDI) Regulation, the citizens should have access to digital wallets by the end of 2026. When introducing new services like this, ensuring high-level data security and privacy is essential for building trust, says professor Tapio Pahikkala.
PRIVIDEMA is connected to various European strategic initiatives. It focuses on real-world and market-ready applications that improve existing solutions.
The main objectives of PRIVIDEMA are to create open-source tools, to initiate efforts to democratise access to technology, to strengthen the skills of cybersecurity professionals, to improve the usability of homomorphic encryption, to create and demonstrate a prototype European identity wallet and to develop and demonstrate a prototype European privacy-preserving cyber threat data processing system.
The University of Turku leads research on privacy-preserving machine learning and the differential privacy framework.
– We will apply state-of-the-art methods, such as differential privacy, to protect sensitive data. We will also continue advancing our work in privacy-preserving machine learning. The goal is to make data usable without revealing any confidential information, says Pahikkala.
The research team at the University of Turku specialises in training, optimising and validating machine learning models while protecting sensitive information and balancing privacy and utility. The team has extensive experience in evaluating privacy-utility trade-offs, providing key insights for real-world use cases in PRIVIDEMA. University of Turku also complements the consortium's expertise in federated learning, contributing innovative approaches to privacy-preserving technologies.
– Our contributions ensure that the project is grounded in cutting-edge science and delivers practical and impactful solutions.
Funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101167964. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre. Neither the European Union nor the European Cybersecurity Competence Centre can be held responsible for them.
