Research
Guardtime’s success in innovation stems from the work of our cryptographers, engineers, scientists and analysts, with qualifications in both foundational and applied research. With over 50 patents granted since 2007, Guardtime has a proven track record in transforming foundational research into practical solutions.
Our research areas include:
- Data security, privacy and cryptography, with a focus on post-quantum / hash-based cryptography, privacy-preserving mechanisms including zero-knowledge systems, differential privacy
- Secure data collaboration via auditable multi-party computation
- Assured AI and federated learning
- Cryptographic accumulators / Authenticated data structures
- Distributed ledger technologies, blockchain interoperability
- Formal verification
- Scalable cryptocurrency systems
- Self-sovereign identities
- Blockchain based solutions for supply chain / IoT challenge
Outcomes of the research are utilized to build breakthrough data security and interoperability solutions in various domains:
- Finance
- Healthcare and life sciences
- Defense
- Network security
- Space (on-going projects pdf)
- Energy (on-going projects pdf)
Research and Innovation Projects
Guardtime is engaged in numerous international research and innovation projects funded by the European Commission (Horizon 2020) and the European Space Agency. The projects enhance Guardtime’s research and innovation competences by enabling structured cooperation with a broad set of stakeholders: from world-leading research institutions, other deep-tech companies to commercialization partners such as large enterprises, governments or international organizations.
CHESS
Active · Horizon
The goal of CHESS is to develop a cybersecurity excellence hub in Estonia and Czech Republic through integrating the cybersecurity institutions and strengths of these regions with the aim to address Europe-wide challenges.
Guardtime is the blockchain technology provider in the project and will contribute to conducting blockchain focused research in the project together with the University of Tartu and TalTech.
DataBri-X
Active · Horizon
Through DataBri-X, European Data Spaces, platforms and marketplaces and their wide range of business, governmental and public, research and civil society stakeholders will be equipped with a holistic and flexible data governance process and a seamless integrated standards based toolbox for data- and metadata management.
Data Process & Technological Bricks for expanding digital value creation in European Data Spaces (DataBri-X) integrates standards-based tools for data- and metadata management which can also be assembled along with relevant requirements, provides open source as well as commercial tools (the bricks / bri-X), and mechanisms to load 3rd party resources like language resources or AI models.
The developed tools can be easily deployed into Data Spaces and thereby will contribute to make Europe the most successful area in the world in terms of data sharing and data re-use, to gain the full benefit from the value of data, while respecting the legal framework relating to security and privacy.
As a result the project provides a holistic, energy-efficient and user-friendly toolbox of practical, robust and scalable bricks/Bri-X (processes, technologies and tools) that improve the interoperability, usability, discoverability, quality, and integrity of data and metadata, with the aim of making data sets ready for expanded digital value creation in the context of European Data Spaces. Guardtime’s role is to be one of the technology providers for the toolbox.
DataBri-X runs until September 2025 and is funded by the EU's HORIZON Innovation Action, grant agreement no. 101070069 under the topic HORIZON-CL4-2021-DATA-01-03 - Technologies for data management (AI, Data and Robotics Partnership).
Gravitate-Health
Active · IMI
Gravitate-Healthis developing digital health tools for patients and healthcare professionals to improve access to trusted information on medicines and care plans.
Gravitate-Health will develop and test an integrated, digital, user-centric health information solution seeking to demonstrate tangible improvements in availability and understanding of health information from a set of trusted sources, starting with regulator-approved medicinal product information and the Electronic Health Record International Patient Summary (EHR-IPS). The main outputs will be an open source digital platform supporting G-Lens functionally, and a White Paper with recommendations on realistic strategies to strengthen access, understanding and future use of digital services like electronic product information (ePI) as a tool for risk minimization.
Guardtime will provide a data auditing mechanism for the main Gravitate-Health components and information sources, enabling to prove the integrity of data and its provenance.
Gravitate-Health runs until November 2025 and received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 945334. This joint undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations [EFPIA].
R2D2
Active · Horizon
R2D2 aims to improve the resilience and reliability of current Electrical Power and Energy Systems against a growing number of threats and vulnerabilities, exposing and tackling weaknesses with potentially harmful and damaging effects on different stakeholders and final customers.
Reliability, Resilience and Defence technologies for the girD (R2D2) proposes a set of novel solutions, that will facilitate the creation of the EU’s reliable, resilient, secure and cyber-aware energy system, making a positive and tangible impact throughout the European Electrical Power and Energy Systems (EPES) value chain.
The R2D2s solutions will be demonstrated in four pilot sites in four different countries, involving all types of energy networks and complementary stakeholders, from large-scale and public DSOs and TSOs to LV customers, going through medium utilities and local energy communities, demonstrating higher impact and replicability potential and cooperation between system operators.
Guardtime’s role is to contribute to the digital security of OT and IT and to EPES safe operation, through delivering significant and effective grid defence service that hinders attackers from violating the smart grid systems and ensures an open, yet rigorous, forensic service that will protect personal data and data integrity.
R2D2 runs until September 2025 and is funded by the EU’s HORIZON Innovation Action, grant agreement no. 101075714 under the topic HORIZON-CL5-2021-D3-02-07 - Reliability and resilience of the grid: Measures for vulnerabilities, failures, risks and privacy.
MapGuard
Active · EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY
The goal of the MapGuard project is to develop a secure and fast response emergency map service for civil protection.
BC4Space
Ended · European Space Agency
BC4Space validated how KSI blockchain technology can be used to verify the integrity and provenance of Earth Observation (EO) data sets and support end-user adoption.
Guardtime was the prime contractor to do the research, design and development of the software that enables the integrity and provenance of operational Earth Observation data as well as securing the long-term data archives in BC4Space.
Guardtime focused on the Copernicus mission data, operated by the ESA. As a result, a demonstrator was built that can be integrated into ESA internal EO data operational services and EO data archives. Blockchain technology enables the full end-to-end chain of custody for data through its lifecycle and guarantees the integrity of the process for applications that collect and make decisions based on actionable reports.
Critical Chains
Ended · H2020
The Critical Chains aimed to tackle illicit transactions by creating a holistic and adaptable framework, including end users and financial authorities in an innovative triangular accountability model.
This model integrated the underlying technologies and presented a novel “as-a-service” (XaaS) platform aiming to protect financial infrastructures against illegal money trafficking and fraud on FinTech e-operations. The aim was to realise a hardware-based cyber-physical security scheme over Security-Privacy Contexts Semantic Modelling. The final product was the Critical-Chains framework that works over cloud and includes the following main building blocks:
- authentication and authorization services strengthened through hardware based secure IoT sticks and bio-metric authentication;
- cryptographic back-end enabling symmetric cryptography, hashing, truly random number generation, prime number and key generation and
- signing and verification system that builds core data integrity layers. In the project, Guardtime is active in requirements analysis and prioritization.
Guardtime offered support for the architecture regarding blockchain component integrations. Moreover, Blockchain-as-a-Service (BCaaS) integrity checking was one of our priorities as well in order to prove fintech environment viability. We also participated in the process of integration and validation of pilots to show how solutions can work in real life use.
Critical Chains ran September 2022 and received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant agreement no. 833326 under the topic SU-DS05-2018-2019 - Digital security, privacy, data protection and accountability in critical sectors.
CyberSEAS
Ended · H2020
CyberSEAS aimed to protect energy production, transmission and delivery across interconnected grids, including at transnational levels.
CyberSEAS: Cyber Securing Energy dAta Services designed, implemented, demonstrated and validatesd an ecosystem of security measures and tools that can be customized and combined based on the specific characteristics of individual setups to improve the resilience of Electrical Power and Energy System (EPES) Critical Infrastructures (CIs) to cyber-attacks.
CyberSEAS aimed to improve the overall resilience of energy supply chains, protecting them from disruptions that exploit the enhanced interactions, the extended involvement models of stakeholders and consumers as channels for complex cyber-attacks, the presence of legacy systems and the increasing connectivity of energy infrastructures, data stores and services retailers.
Guardtime led the project’s task that designs and delivers techniques and tools exploiting advanced cyber security monitoring features provided by CyberSEAS to detect complex attacks to EPES assets. Our main role was to deploy MIDA on energy providers' assets and additionally report to SIEM if malicious activity has been detected.
CyberSEAS ran until September 2024 and was funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant agreement no. 101020560 under the topic SU-DS04-2018-2020 - Cybersecurity in the Electrical Power and Energy System (EPES): an armour against cyber and privacy attacks and data breaches.DLT for Space Situational Awareness
Ended · European Space Agency
DGS aimed to deliver software prototypes to test the viability for how space ground systems could be operated in the future supported by blockchain solutions.
Guardtime’s role lied in identifying how blockchain technologies can provide opportunities for organisations in the space industry to provide enhanced security and operational efficiency, with the ultimate aim to partner with industry leaders in the space industry to provide enhanced product and bolster the security and situational awareness of ground station platforms.
DGS ran until September 2020.
ECHO
Ended · H2020
ECHO strived to enhance Europe’s technological sovereignty, providing a single market for cybersecurity technological solutions.
ECHO delivered an organized and coordinated approach to improve proactive cyber defence of the European Union, through effective and efficient multi-sector collaboration. The partners of the project developed, modelled and demonstrated a network of cyber research and competence centres, with a central competence at the hub. The Central Competence Hub serves as the focal point for the ECHO Multi-sector Assessment Framework enabling multi-sector dependencies management, provision of an ECHO Early Warning System, an ECHO Federation of Cyber Ranges and management of an expanding collection of Partner Engagements.
Guardtime's main task in this project was to define, lead, and develop the E-FCR. The E-FCR was envisioned to interconnect exciting cyber range capabilities through a portal which will enable users to develop multi-sector cyber scenarios and exercises.
ECHO ran until February 2023 and received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant agreement no. 830943 under the topic SU-ICT-03-2018 - Establishing and operating a pilot for a Cybersecurity Competence Network to develop and implement a common Cybersecurity Research & Innovation Roadmap.
EOGuard
Ended · European Space Agency
EOGuard guarantees data integrity and immutability while mitigating risks of accidental data corruption, processing errors and other vulnerabilities like security violation, data tampering or malicious interference in the databases.
EOGuard scoped the requirements for the use of cryptographic techniques for applying data processing over encrypted data, and demonstrated privacy preserving AI in EO analytics as a proof of concept. The innovative elements of this project were the following:
- Automated data and software elements traceability.
- Enhanced cyber-security of existing EO ground segment infrastructures.
- System-wide consideration of provenance solutions for federated cloud provenance.
- Fostering the exploitation of data and enhancement of information services.
Guardtime focused on providing security for ESA EO data archives in order to facilitate the availability and usability of these datasets and reduce the costs of archiving EO products: eg. Earth observers, ERS, Copernicus data, 3rd party missions. The solution created by Guardtime ensures the integrity and provenance of ESA EO data sets and related processes.
EOGuard runs until May 2022.
EU-SysFlex
Ended · H2020
EU-SysFlex strives to identify and demonstrate new types of system and flexibility services for renewable sources of electricity.
EU-SysFlex project identified issues and solutions associated with energy flexibility services that were needed to cope with the challenge that the changing to low carbon and renewable energy dependent economy is facing. EU-Sysflex provided practical assistance to transmission system and distribution system operators as well as other key energy sector players across Europe. This should ultimately lead to identification of a long-term roadmap to facilitate the large-scale integration of renewable energy across Europe.
The EU-SysFlex project activities brought new solutions to the market: from the development of new approaches for system operation with high renewables, to market design and regulatory requirements, as well as integration of new system services and data management plans to cover the pan-European market.
Guardtime led the cybersecurity and privacy vertical and helps to identify pitfalls, shortcomings and solutions for new energy flexibility services that need to comply with the high requirements from a privacy and security perspective. Guardtime is provided a specific hardware solution for energy data exchange and also helped to define cyber security methods and data privacy guidelines for data exchange platforms.
SysFlex ran untilMarch 2022 and received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant agreement no. 773505 under the topic LCE-04-2017 - Demonstration of system integration with smart transmission grid and storage technologies with increasing share of renewables.
i3-MARKET
Ended · H2020
i3-MARKET created interoperable and secure marketplaces with decentralised economy-driven and scalable data repositories.
The i3-MARKET project addressed the growing demand for a single European Data Market Economy by innovating marketplace platforms, demonstrating with industrial implementations that the data economy growth is possible. i3-MARKET proposal provided technologies for trustworthy (secure and reliable), data-driven collaboration and federation of existing and new future marketplace platforms, special attention on industrial data and particularly on sensitive commercial data assets from both SMEs to large industrial corporations is taken.
Guardtime’s role in the project was to provide knowledge and technical assistance to the data integrity and provenance related challenges as well as develop a decentralised data storage solution. Guardtime also helped to define data security methods and data pseudonymization elements.
i3 ran until December 2022 and received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant agreement no. 871754 under the topic: ICT-13-2018-2019 - Supporting the emergence of data markets and the data economy.
Innovative Consent Service Development (INA)
Ended · ERDF
INA project goal was to create a trusted consent handling solution for healthcare institutions and medical workers.
Guardtime's role in project was to provide the solution for consent immutability. Thus, enabling all parties to trust the given consent's validity. The real time clinical guideline management solution CoNurse adopts Guardtime’s Health technology and KSI stacks to preserve data integrity for the versioning and auditing processes while ensuring informed consent management from all participating users.
The partners of this project were Guardtime OÜ and Cognuse OÜ.
INA ran until December 2020.
This project is funded by EU European Regional Development fund through Connected Health Cluster.
KISS
Ended · Governmental
KISS project piloted two use cases to test and demonstrate blockchain’s ability to increase the cybersecurity resilience of electricity infrastructure.
The Keyless Infrastructure Security System (KISS) project's first use case focused on securing critical data stored and exchanged between the energy management system or distribution management system and energy delivery systems. The second use case demonstrated how blockchain can help improve asset management and supply chain security for critical energy delivery systems. The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
NAIADES
Active · H2020
NAIADES objective was to transform urban water management through automated and smarter water resource management and environmental monitoring.
The project’s goal was to offer a high level of water services for residential and commercial consumers, exploiting the efficient use of physical and digital components of the water ecosystem. NAIADES relied and built upon on various types of big data collected from different water monitoring and control systems, in order to (i) establish more efficient water consumption in both retail and commercial environments, (ii) generate increased confidence of water consumers, (iii) to measure the water quality in residential buildings, offices and public infrastructures, (iv) assure the safety and reliability through the detection of warning signs in near real time and other monitoring systems, and (v) enhance public awareness on water consumption and usage savings.
Guardtime was actively involved in security infrastructure build up in the project, designing a novel blockchain-backed logging architecture that provides anti-tamper and early warning protection for critical log and event feeds, by registering events with KSI® blockchain and creating an audit trail, that can be independently verified at any point in the future.
NAIADES ran until December 2022 and received funding from the EU's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant agreement no. 820985 under the topic SC5-11-2018 - Digital solutions for water: linking the physical and digital world for water solutions.
PRIViLEDGE
Ended · H2020
PRIViLEDGE realised cryptographic protocols supporting privacy, anonymity, and efficient decentralised consensus for DLTs.
In the project, several European key players in cryptographic research and from the fintech and blockchain domains united to push the limits of cryptographic protocols for privacy and security. Results from PRIViLEDGE were demonstrated through four ledger-based solutions: verifiable online voting, contract validation and execution for insurance, university diploma record ledger, and update mechanism for stake-based ledgers.
Guardtime served as the project coordinator and also led the communication, dissemination, and exploitation activities. Guardtime also led one of the four use-cases of the project, providing a prototype for a health insurance system that combines secure multi-party computation among the ACO (accountable care organization) members with zero-knowledge proofs that enable the insurers to verify the correctness of medical reports without leaking the details of individual patients. In addition, Guardtime was also making smaller contributions to both privacy-enhancing cryptography and cryptographic protocols research topics within the project.
PRIViLEDGE ran until June 2021 and received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant agreement no. 78047 under the topic DS-06-2017 - Cybersecurity PPP: Cryptography.
RESISTO
Ended · H2020
RESISTO is an innovative solution for Communication Infrastructure providing holistic cyber and physical situation awareness and enhanced resilience.
RESISTO helps Communications Infrastructures Operators to take the best countermeasures and reactive actions exploiting the combined use of risk and resilience preparatory analyses, detection and reaction technologies, applications and processes in the physical and cyber domains.
Guardtime’s role in the project was to take part in system architectural planning and component implementation. Within that we supported anomaly detection with active and passive sensors, offering digital proof when it is needed. Additionally, Guardtime contributed to the development and integration of KSI adapters installing and integrating them for the integrity protection of the system. We also worked to create central RESISTO environment knowledge base integrity with the Kafka plugin that allows connecting different sensors with a signing mechanism.
RESISTO ran until November 2021 and received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant agreement no. 786409 under the topic CIP-01-2016-2017 - Prevention, detection, response and mitigation of the combination of physical and cyber threats to the critical infrastructure of Europe.
SecureGas
Ended · H2020
SecureGas aimed to increase the security and resilience of the European gas network, by taking into account physical and cyber threats.
The project defined a blueprint on how critical gas infrastructure should be planned, designed, built, operated, and maintained to cope with cyber-physical security threats. The results were offered as services for the security and resilience of the EU gas network through a Platform as a Service (PaaS) model, that allows flexibility and third-party interoperability.
Guardtime provided the KSI Blockchain technology to SecureGas to build integrity verification mechanisms in order to protect the input provided by different SecureGas modules and distributing these inputs between all trusted participants in the system. The KSI blockchain technology was applied to the Safety & Security (S&S) Platform for Gas CI.
SecureGas ran until October 2021 and received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, grant agreement no. 833017 under the topic SU-INFRA01-2018-2019-2020 - Prevention, detection, response and mitigation of combined physical and cyber threats to critical infrastructure in Europe.
Secure SatCom
Ended · European Space Agency
Secure SatCom (BlockSatCom) explored the opportunities and architectures for the application of blockchain in SatCom systems.
The study aimed to identify and validate the DLT/blockchain use cases that can be implemented in future satellite systems and to define the system architecture most suited for their implementation. It also identified the benefits of use of DLT applications in the SatCom market (e.g. in spectrum management, tracking satellite manufacturing supply chain, etc.) and how DLT can be used to improve specific SatCom related operations. The goal was to define the system architecture most suited for the implementation of the largest possible subset of DLT use cases identified.
The study was led by GMV, Guardtime’s task was to survey and evaluate DLT architectures and, as a result, determine the use-cases to be enhanced by Satellite Communication systems.
Secure Satcom ran until April 2022 and was funded by the European Space Agency.
SPACE4GREEN
Ended · Horizon
SPACE4GREEN sought to enable a scalable B2B platform for trusted digital data sharing supporting automated verification of data integrity, including the time, position and identity associated with the data handling process.
Trusted and Green traceability through EU Space Technologies (Space4Green) focused on enabling trusted time and position provided by Galileo and Copernicus services into blockchain technology for industries that need traceability of goods, services, persons as well as the digitalization of their processes with the assurance that the authenticated position has been delivered without any possible modification. The goal was to provide a Business-to-Business platform for trusted digital data sharing supporting automated verification of data trustworthiness.
Guardtime’s role was to be the the key provider of distributed ledger technologies and protect food supply chains by leveraging its KSI® Blockchain, offering proof of time and integrity of electronic data as well as attribution of origin, i.e. endpoints authentication. KSI was integrated with prototype services to support verification of location metadata potentially associated with any digital object stored in the infrastructure.
Space4Green ran until October 2024 and was funded by the EU's HORIZON Innovation Action, grant agreement no. 101082630 under the topic HORIZON-EUSPA-2021-SPACE-02-53 - EGNSS applications for the Digital Age.
SOFIE
Ended · H2020
The SOFIE project aimed to develop a blockchain driven federated platform for enabling information exchange of different IoTs and data silos.
Secure open federation was the key concept of the SOFIE approach. The aim was to enable creation of business platforms, based on existing IoT platforms and distributed ledgers, without needing to negotiate with any gatekeepers. The wide applicability of the approach was tested through four pilots.
Guardtime lead the project's communication, dissemination and exploitation activities. Furthermore, Guardtime contributed to architectural work leveraging our expertise with blockchains and ledgers and is responsible for leading one out of the four pilots of the project. Guardtime also lead the energy data exchange pilot that demonstrated how the SOFIE federated framework can be used to liberate the energy consumption data in data silos, grant the access control over the data to data owners and enable the GDPR compliance.
SOFIE ran until December 2020 and received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement no. 779984 under the topic IoT-03-2017 - R&I on IoT integration and platforms.STCM
Ended · ESA
The goal of the STCM project is to develop and test means to monitor and manage space traffic coordination systems that exchange collision avoidance data between entities in a secure and trusted way.
TrueTrail
Ended · H2020
TrueTrail assures that audit trails are immutable and independently verifiable, leveraging KSI® Blockchain technology for a decentralized trust anchor.
TrueTrail enables organisations to streamline compliance reporting, handle disputes and maintain true situational awareness, by providing detection of unautohrized changes to logs, databases and data streams and enabling their integrity. Logs are the core sources for insights into the state of digital systems and central to discovering cyber-attacks. Thus, malicious actors commonly remove traces of their activities by manipulating with logs. With TrueTrail attackers cannot remain hidden or change evidence in log data, as not a single record can be added, removed or altered undetectably.
Guardtime has brought a fundamentally new approach to log security, as TrueTrail:
- enables massive scale automated and independent log and database integrity assurance;
- provides real-time and log integrity checks and long-term log record validity;
- makes any log data immutable and detects currently hidden log manipulations.
Participation in International Forums
Our active participation in various international organizations supports Guardtime’s strong position in the European and global policy-making processes. We see that collaboration between industry, research organisations and policymakers is necessary to define and engage in R&D efforts that meet market needs.
We have initiated different formats for and remain committed to the global, regional and domestic cooperation between public, private and academic counterparts.
For example, Guardtime is the founding member and an active participant at the European Cyber Security Organization (ECSO), International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA), North European Cybersecurity Cluster (NECC) and the Estonian Information Security Association (EISA). We contribute to the work of European Blockchain Partnership, EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum, Cybersecurity Tech Accord, CCIA, Energy BRIDGE, Finance Estonia and Estonian Defence Industry Association, as well as the CEN/CLC/JTC 19 Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies standardisation committee, and are a part of the EIT Digital ecosystem.