Blog

Final Review Meeting in Brussels

With the end of October the official project lifetime of MATTHEW came to its end. The MATTHEW consortium reached the set objectives and submitted all Deliverables and Milestones in time. Additionally, an outstanding number of scientific publications present the MATTHEW project outcomes. (Find them openly accessible: https://matthew-project.eu/project-outcome)

On 23^rd November 2016 the project final review meeting took place at the EC premises in Brussels. After a general introduction to the project and the results in the technical work packages, a public session was scheduled. The consortium used this opportunity to show the demonstrators of the 3 Use Cases:

• Contactless Payment with SiP for Wearables + nanoSIM Integration of MATTHEW components
• Demo on Access Control System with SIM + SAM based on CIPURSE protocol (4-eyes scenario)
• Anonymous Ticketing with ABCs on mobile platforms + Protocol Demo with Secure Elements

The project external visitors were very interested and and engaged in a vivid discussion on the MATTHEW use cases. After the final session with the reviewers and the project officer, all Deliverables and Reports were accepted and the progress impressed the experts in the review panel.

The excellent outcomes of MATTHEW will enable further cooperation within the consortium partners and the technological developments will be included into several innovations.

The MATTHEW consortium met for a technical meeting on 27^th and 28^th of September in Regensburg (Germany) at the premises of Infineon Germany. It was the last technical meeting for the MATTHEW partners and the chance to prepare for the final review meeting. The aim of the technical meeting was a final alignment between the partners for the upcoming last deliverables and reports of the project.

Major focus was put on WP6 regarding the finalization and appropriate reporting of the evaluation and test results and on WP7 concerning dissemination and exploitation as well as the final project reporting. Additional discussions about ongoing issues and planning towards the project finalization took place.

Further, the meeting concentrated on the preparation of the final review meeting. The partners agreed on an agenda and relevant inputs and demonstrations for the final review meeting, which will take place on 23^rd November 2016 at the EC premises in Brussels. The consortium is looking forward to presenting the excellent results to the EC.

The MATTHEW consortium met on July 12^th, 2016 at the premises of IMA in Prague (Czech Republic) for a one day technical and general assembly meeting. The aim of the technical meeting was a final alignment between the partners for the upcoming last months of the project, whereas the general assembly meeting targeted tasks related to the project internal management.

The technical meeting started off with a recapitulation of the past three project months. Within these three months the MATTHEW team submitted eight deliverables to the European Commission. During the discussions it was pointed out several times that the efficient internal review process is an important factor to keep the deliverables’ quality as high as possible. Afterwards IAIK presented their new publication that deals with Blind Signatures in the Standard Model, which fits very well to the MATTHEW context. The technical meeting was closed with an intense discussion about the remaining technical deliverables that have to be submitted until the project end. Therefore, responsibilities as well as deadlines for the contributions were defined.

During the general assembly meeting the project coordinator informed the project team about the upcoming reporting duties as well as the non-technical deliverables that will be submitted by the end of October 2016.

When summarizing the technical and general assembly meeting it can be said that is was a very important meeting in order to ensure successful last project months with respect to technical as well as administrative work.

In the middle of May the MATTHEW consortium met for the second time in 2016 at the premises of Gemalto in La Ciotat, France. One of the first discussion points was the timely submission of three deliverables due by the end of April 2016 and the therefore successfully reached Milestone MS4.

The next agenda point was the upcoming submission of five deliverables by the end of June 2016. Therefore, the WP2 leader (IAIK) presented a novel protocol for the third use case that is based on Attribute-Based Cryptography (ABC), which will be the main content of D2.2. Furthermore, all WP5 partners discussed the upcoming reports on the implementation of the MATTHEW prototypes. These reports are also due by the end of June 2016.

The second day started with a recap of the discussed points from Day 1 and fixing a roadmap for the June 2016 deliverables in order to ensure timely as well as high quality submissions. The remaining time was dedicated to management issues such as risk management.

When summarizing the technical meeting it can be stated that the topics discussed and the decisions taken, are crucial for achieving a highly efficient and fruitful remaining project time.

Within the MATTHEW project IMA is working on the next generation access control platform.  This platform features an NFC enabled card reader that is equipped with a CIPURSE™ SAM (Secure Access Module). The SAM provides the necessary cryptographic function, which is needed for the protocol execution. Instead of using conventional key cards IMA’s platform utilizes NFC enabled smart phones. The credentials are securely stored on the mobile’s SIM card. As soon as the NFC reader receives the credentials from the phone, they are forwarded to the access control terminal that verifies them and decides if access is granted or not. More information about the IMA framework that also represents the second use case within the MATTHEW project can be found in D1.1 in Chapter 2.2.

The figure above depicts the reader, the access control terminal as well as two smart phones. A clear advantage of this system is that no additional smart cards are needed, but only an NFC enabled smart phone, which has to be tapped to the reader. If additional security mechanisms are needed for the access control the IMA solution offers two possibilities:

1. The user has to enter a PIN, which is attached to the credentials before they are transmitted to the reader.

2. The reader can request the approval of another person that also has to tap the phone to the reader in order to grant access.

During the second review meeting IMA presented a first prototype of their system to the European Commission.

This week the MATTHEW consortium met for the first time in 2016 to discuss technical issues,  at the premises of AMS in Unterpremstätten, Austria. The meeting was split into two days, whereas the first day was focusing on work performed since the last technical meeting. Therefore, each partner presented an update of their ongoing work as well as an outlook of the work plans for the upcoming weeks and months. As during the next months, a number of deliverables are due, the consortium fixed a roadmap in order to ensure the quality as well as a timely submission of the documents.

The second day was dedicated to technical discussions, which took place in a workshop-like atmosphere. These discussions focused on the integration and demonstration of the three MATTHEW use cases:

• Advanced Mobile Banking Application
• Advanced Access Control Application
• Advanced Ticketing Application

The workshop participants informed afterwards the entire consortium about the discussed topics and how they will tackle upcoming challenges.

After two days of fruitful discussions it can be said that the meeting was a success as all agenda points could be addressed and the roadmap for the last months of the MATTHEW project was fixed.

With the end of October, the 2nd project year of MATTHEW comes to its end. In the second year of MATTHEW we were concerned about four major technical developments:

● system security by utilizing ABCs, PUFs and multiple SEs
● antenna design and the corresponding hardware integration
● integration of a first nanoSIM prototype
● application development for the different use cases.

Besides these technical tracks, the MATTHEW consortium focused also on standardization as well as dissemination activities. As you see, we covered lots of challenging topics, had intensive technical discussions during several meetings and telephone conferences and in this way, we managed to make a big step towards the planned innovational outcome. The following points summarize the work of our successful 2nd project year:

☑ made excellent progress towards technical objectives
☑ released 3 source code libraries
☑ successfully submitted 5 Deliverables
☑ represented MATTHEW at well-known occasions like 8th RFID Symposium, CSP Innovation Forum, ISO14443 Task     Force Meetings
☑ published 6 high-quality scientific papers
☑ became part of the EU Yearbook
☑ made our project website more lively including a project blog as well as social media

We are now looking forward to present our project achievements of year 2 to the European Commission and provide you soon with our public Deliverables on the website. For now, find out more about MATTHEW outcomes within the published papers and source code libraries here.

IAIK at Graz University of Technology released the source code of a cryptographic library suitable for pairing-based protocols. The library, written in C, implements bilinear pairings and the respective group operations over a 254-bit and a 160-bit Barreto-Naehrig elliptic curve.

Its configurability makes it perfectly suitable for optimization towards different architectures. However, the probably most interesting target platforms for the library comprise embedded microcontrollers as it is designed to yield a low memory footprint. Besides the basic group operations, the library comes with implementations of pairing-based identity-based encryption and group signature schemes.

For obtaining the source code and more information please click here.

This week the MATTHEW consortium met at Gemalto’s premises in Meudon, France for a general assembly as well as a technical meeting. The meeting was split into two days where the first day was focusing on updates from the single work packages as well as an alignment between the partners for the upcoming tasks and deliverables. Furthermore, IAIK announced during the meeting the release of their new library for pairing-based protocols.

The second day was totally dedicated to the upcoming second review meeting, which will take place on November 26^th 2015 in Brussels.

After two days of intense and long discussions it can be said that the meeting was a total success as all agenda points were met.

We added a blog to our website in order to keep you updated about the MATTHEW project life, as a lot of progress has been made during the last 21 months of the MATTHEW project.

Looking back to the past 21 months, good collaboration between all 8 partners, deep and long technical discussions, successful submission of 7 Deliverables, 2 Milestones reached, several dissemination activities etc. come to my mind. We met several times in different European countries to encourage project work – like in Meudon (France) last February (see picture below).

Find further information on our Deliverables and Publications here.

We will keep you updated about ongoing work, publications and participation in events.