What is project PHACKS?

Strategic Context 

As digitisation increases across economies and societies, and deepens into almost all aspects of citizens’ daily lives, the requirements for more collaboration are growing. However, for reasons of safety, competition and regulatory compliance, organisations are increasingly cautious about any sharing of sensitive and personal data for two fundamental reasons.   

• Firstly, risks that loss of control of the data will lead to unforeseen commercial and legal consequences, particularly if it involves data that is subject to regulatory compliance, such as personal data. 
• Secondly, risks that the quality of the data is discovered to be poor, leading to liability issues and reputational damage that reduce competitiveness or worse.   

Consequently, many organisations will not collaborate because they fear the consequences of information sharing, which undermines collaboration, frustrates collective benefit and exposes a community to additional friction, risks and costs. This problem applies to almost all government and industry organisations in the EU and its allies and partners.   

Technology can both help and hinder.  However, encryption is not the answer because data is still leaving an organisation to be converted to plaintext for processing. In most cases, the requirement is actually to verify claimed data, not to share it.  In other words, to know that my organisation’s data matches or does not match your organisation’s, but I am not disclosing anything to your organisation so there is no risk to me.  

Here, mathematical techniques can be used to establish whether two or more organisations hold the same data or have the same answers to predefined questions – without sharing any encrypted or plaintext data. No data leaves any organisation and there is no communication risk to the data. As a result, many organisations that would not previously share data are now willing to collaborate in this way to a finite extent.  This is beginning to include government organisations. 

Demand for such mathematically based privacy-preserving data validation mechanisms is increasing.  Sedicii’s EU Project PHACKS is using Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) and similar mathematical transform methods in its platform and collaboration networks, with additional security controls to address the two fundamental reasons above why organisations can’t or won’t collaborate today.  By helping an organisation improve its internal data quality, which improves the quality of decision making and increases overall efficiency and effectiveness.  

Purpose 

The purpose of PHACKS is to enable companies and government organisations to interact and collaborate in ways that have not been previously possible resulting in four interlinked beneficial outcomes: 

• Improved decision-making resulting from frequent or real-time validation of specific data attributes so that an organisation can rely on the data being accurate and timely. 
• Reduced costs and risks resulting from significant improvements in data quality within and across organisations. 
• Increased competitiveness resulting from improved internal effectiveness and increased regulatory compliance. 
• Increased strategic competitive advantage resulting from the ability to collaborate much more effectively and safely with partner, customer, supply chain and government organisations. 

 PHACKS is an EU-funded commercialisation project to establish collaborative communities in which organisations can validate specific attributes of sensitive data, particularly for regulatory and business risk purposes, without sharing or disclosing any sensitive data at all. 

Scope 

The scope of PHACKS is to form up to 5 collaborative communities, each of which is using Sedicii’s zero knowledge proof (ZKP) platform to validate data attributes and potentially detect anomalies between organisations, but without sharing any information.  

Project Overview 

PHACKS is an EU-funded commercialisation project.   It is required to establish up to 5 collaborative communities of EU-based organisations that would use the ZKP platform for relying parties to validate claimed attribute data against one or more authoritative or corroborative source in each community.  Its duration is 3 years overall with 1.5 years for building the communities prior to pilots, analysis etc and project closure (Oct 2026) followed by Exploitation.  Each community is to be centred in the EU but end user Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Relying Parties (RPs) can be from outside the EU.  

Collaboration 

The list of candidate communities is continuing to grow: 

• Address verification.  Already operational service in Ireland, approved by the Data Protection Commissioner.  Next stage is for EU MS organisations to be able to verify Irish addresses, with a view to creating a reciprocal address verification service within each MS. 
• Tax rebate eligibility.  This would help defeat tax rebate fraud.  
• Collaborative KYC/AML Enhanced Customer Checks in the financial sector.
• Digitisation of Pension provider checks. 
• Cyber security collaborative anomaly detection for Collaborative Cyber Situational Awareness (CCSA) and incident response.
• Age verification 
• Inter-register data quality management improvement and anomaly detection. 
• Cross-border online drug prescription tracing to comply with the EU Falsified Medicine Directive requirements.  
• Cross-border customs tariff and payments validation based on commercially sensitive pricing. 

A goal is to have more than 400 EU companies and EU member government organisations participate in project PHACKS in some way over the years, either as authorities, as data sources, as major user organisations or as small company end-users.   

Workplan 

There are 5 work packages: 

• WP1 – Project management 
• WP2 – Collaborative community 
• WP3 – Dissemination, communication and outreach 
• WP4 – Platform development and customisation 
• WP5 – Exploitation and growth 

WP 2 and 3 are the main effort, in order to build the communities and then develop collaborative requirements.   WP 4 has developed the platform and some of the customisation, but the requirements for the remaining customisation will depend on the communities themselves.  WP 5 is to focus on scale up after Oct 2026.   It will start in Q1 2026.  

Team 

Sedicii Innovations Ltd, based in Ireland, owns the technology that will enable the PHACKS project which is funded by the ECCC.   

Members of the Sedicii team have experience in many areas and disciplines in over 40 countries, EU organisations, UN, OECD and NATO.  This includes national security, military operations, UN, NATO, counter terrorism, law enforcement, government departments, border control and customs, taxation, finance health & pharmaceuticals, transportation, logistics, aerospace, aviation, defence, maritime, real estate, food traceability, benefits payments, election monitoring and manufacturing.  To help organisations collaborate securely, we have expertise in collaboration tools (including ZKP, SMPC, MLC), collaborative cyber defence, collaborative risk management, operations centres, data quality management, access control, identity and access management, identification techniques, biometrics, addiction behaviours, privacy, anti-money laundering, counter-fraud, know your customer, know your business, company registers, age verification, anti-child abuse and privacy in social media.