SECCO: Secure Cooperation

Project Description Cooperation is of fundamental importance in distributed systems and can, from a security point of view, be divided into two types according to whether or not the cooperating parties trust each other. Trust can generally be assumed when entities belonging to the same organization need to cooperate; typical scenarios are cooperative work and workflow systems. On the other hand, cooperation among parties that do not necessarily trust each other is one of the major challenges to be solved when the emerging information infrastructure is to become fully operational. This will be typically the case for electronic commerce, including negotiations, collective decision making (e.g. voting), contract signing, or payments. The topic of this project is secure cooperation in a distributed environment among parties that neither trust each other nor have a common party they all trust. The project is managed by Prof. Dr. Ueli Maurer of ETH and Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Frei of UBILAB.