The dGUARD project team brings together the expertise of three dynamic partners: the i2CAT Foundation, Bloock, and TopDoctors. This collaborative consortium leverages each partner’s specialized skills to develop and pilot dGUARD, an innovative, privacy-centric data-sharing platform tailored for healthcare applications. Bloock contributes robust SSI and blockchain components for secure data handling, while i2CAT focuses on advanced cryptographic techniques such as Zero-Knowledge circuits and proxy re-encryption. TopDoctors, through its eHealthcareIT branch, brings in healthcare sector knowledge and a real-world environment for piloting the solution. This diverse and highly specialized team is poised to redefine secure and transparent data sharing in healthcare by ensuring that privacy and trust remain at the core of all interactions.
Can you briefly present your team?
We are a consortium consisting of a non-profit entity (i2CAT Foundation) and two for-profit entities (Bloock and TOPDOCTORS). BLOOCK will build the necessary SSI and blockchain components, i2Cat will build the ZK circuits and the proxy re-encryption scheme and BeHit will implement the pilot.
Bloock is a company that is specialized in the development of blockchain solutions regarding data security and privacy.
i2CAT Foundation is a research and innovation centre that empowers citizens through open and participative digital social innovation with territorial capillarity and promotes pioneering and strategic initiatives.
eHEALTHCAREIT SL is a for profit digital health company under Top Doctors Holding SL, boasting a diverse team comprising medical professionals, data scientists, analysts, engineers, and developers.
This versatile team is well-prepared to execute the project, given their expertise in research, decentralized technologies, digital identity, medical technology, data science, and cryptography.
How did you come up with this project idea and what benefits will it bring to the end users?
Today, there are still major challenges to be addressed to make the great leap towards a human-centred, reliable, and sustainable digital data sharing, to solve problems such as: digital identity management, data security and privacy, managing and controlling access to data, as well as defining governance mechanisms with the aim of facilitating the exchange and reuse of data in a secure, reliable, and transparent way.
dGUARD is a co-creation in the field of healthcare, an innovative solution that provide a user-friendly tool while guaranteeing user and data privacy, accuracy, certification, data integrity and traceability.
Why did you apply to the TrustChain call and has your vision changed since then?
In the context of the trustChain ecosystem, the development of dGUARD facilitates the management of user consents and enables privacy-preserving data sharing among stakeholders does resolve several of the challenges stated in OpenCall 2 Mainly being:
Ensure information anonymity and accuracy: ensure information provenance while maintaining anonymity.
Control over access to personal information: remain in control of the data, even when a third party is responsible for storing it.
Data-sharing traceability and transparency: obtain a verifiable and independent audit trail of all data sharing interactions.
Support digital-sovereignty data flows: leverage SSI principles to foaster trustworthy digital identification & interactions.
Privacy-preserving data sharing mechanism: allow users to reliably encrypt data to prevent from data controller fraud.
Align incentives while increasing cybersecurity: establish different roles in the data-sharing economy to increase information security.
The dGUARD platform plays a pivotal role in fortifying the trust chain ecosystem, fostering heightened levels of privacy, security, and accountability in data sharing endeavours. This platform, available as open-source software, empowers any entity seeking solutions in the data sharing realm to leverage its capabilities effectively.
What is the most valuable takeout from the TrustChain project and why was the topic of the Open Call important to you/your team?
The objectives of dGUARD are fully aligned with the goals of TRUSTCHAIN, by providing a framework that ensures data privacy. The platform addresses the challenges of ensuring privacy, accuracy, consent management and data traceability and solves them by proposing solutions on:
- Lack of control over access to personal information. Individuals sharing personal data and data consumers often lack direct control over data access and verification of authenticity and consent. Establishing a trust mechanism is crucial to empower both parties for consent management and data authenticity, independently of third-party involvement.
- Lack of anonymity and privacy. Data is often shared without adequate safeguards, resulting in gaps in anonymity and privacy. It is essential to implement a privacy-preserving authentication mechanism that allows users to reliably anonymize data on the client side. Additionally, deploying encryption schemes like proxy re-encryption can enable users to maintain control over their data, even when it is held by third parties.
- Lack of data traceability and accountability. Data sharing should be traceable, with well-defined accountability mechanisms in position. All digital interactions related to data sharing must be traceable and notarized to ensure maximum transparency and non-repudiation, reinforcing the accuracy and verifiability of procedures and actors involved.
Did you establish collaboration with any of the TrustChain teams or plan for any kind of synergies? If yes, what is the biggest potential in such collaborations?
During the project, we analysed possible collaborations with projects from previous calls and other projects from the second open call, we were able to identify possible collaborations and synergies, which confirmed our willingness to participate and collaborate in the TRUSTCHAIN call.
During the project we focused on developing the platform and validating it in an environment as real as possible, this approach did not allow us to establish more direct collaborations, however the results allow us to be satisfied because now these collaborations can be established in a very agile and simple way.
What are your expectations regarding the TrustChain software ecosystem and its contribution to the NGI priority areas?
For the dGUARD team, the TrustChain ecosystem allows to find an innovative space that incorporates multiple and diverse technological approaches, allowing the developed components to contribute to improve the functionalities and services of the existing ecosystem. For this reason, we have implemented a number of components to solve multiple use cases such as the ones listed below, and we encourage all projects to incorporate them with full willingness to adapt and improve them according to their needs and requirements.
- An SSI based e-consent management system to grant control over shared data to individuals.
- A privacy-preserving authentication based on SSI and ZKP for anonymity, non-repudiation, authenticity, and accuracy of data.
- A complete audit trail notarized on top of blockchain to enhance accountability, traceability, and transparency of data sharing procedures.
- A privacy-preserving and integrity of the data storage based on proxy- re encryption cryptography guarantees data privacy and the user be able to grant access permission in a cryptographic method.
What are the next steps for your team?
Once the solution reaches its optimal refinement and meets the stringent standards of quality aligned with market needs, our focus will pivot towards expanding its market reach and penetration. This pivotal phase entails leveraging the invaluable asset of customer testimonials while concurrently initiating a strategic partnership approach.
Our strategic agenda involves a gradual expansion of operations, strategically building upon the achievements of pilot programs and the favourable feedback garnered from our valued customers.
Through this, we aim to not only attract additional institutional investors but also to engage with potential distributors who can help amplify our solution’s visibility and accessibility across diverse markets and regions.
In this third phase, the business approach will be more linked to licenses based on usage of the platform as our channels will be the ones executing the integrations once the software is stabilized.
