The six figure investment from Innovate UK will allow MIRACL and Edinburgh Napier to engage in a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) programme with a focus on cryptography. 

Cryptography is a way of protecting information and communication online through the use of codes. The two and a half year collaboration aims to bring together new methods of securing data to protect it, along with protecting the rights of citizens to privacy. 

The investment into this partnership was led by Innovate UK, which is a national innovation agency. Its aim is to help UK businesses grow through the development of new products and services.

The identity-focused research laboratory will build products and services for MIRACL to take to market such as copyright protection, data loss protection, and processing encrypted data. The academic team lead at Edinburgh Napier, Professor Bill Buchanan said he hopes this partnership will help secure the UK as a world leader in cryptography and data encryption. 

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It will allow us to build on the knowledge of MIRACL and move forward our vision of creating a more trusted, secure and privacy-respecting internet,” said Buchanan. 

According to Rob Griffin, CEO at MIRACL, protecting online users is an ever growing challenge for internet regulators. New methods of cryptography must continue to develop to keep up with attacks that will come from quantum computers. “Left unchecked, bad actors will seek to exploit the plethora of personal identifiable information that is frequently and unwittingly being made available to them,” said Griffin. 

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“As the online world continues to expand and evolve so quickly, the risks to our digital privacy are rapidly compounding,” said Griffin. “This vital research with the world-renowned computing team at Edinburgh Napier will pave the way for future privacy-enabled security solutions.”

Edinburgh Napier will contribute to MIRACL’s multi-factor solution for authentication and transaction signing that runs natively on any device without downloads. No data is stored by MIRACL, making it GDPR friendly. It is currently science to the US government, Intel, Google and Microsoft.