• « Faster Stronger Cryptography » (FAST) leaded by Tony Ezome (University of Masuku, Franceville in Gabon) and Damien Robert (Inria team LFANT).

• « Smart Agriculture Monitoring » (AGRINET) leaded by Riaan Wolhuter (University of Stellenbosch in South Africa) and Nathalie Mitton (Inria team FUN).

AGRINET - Smart agriculture monitoring

Efficient farming is not possible without relevant and up to date information regarding plant stress, imminent disease, harvest time prognosis and many others. During the last 6-8 years, techniques to implement flexible and adaptive sensor networks have seen major development with excellent application possibilities.

The Agrinet team proposes the development, practical deployment and evaluation of an advanced, self-configuring wireless sensor network (WSN) to support such a data acquisition system, as an important input to precision farming in general and to apply it for viticultural use and potato crops. The system is intended to provide real time, distributed, frequently updated parameter values, at many freely selected vineyard and field locations. This information could be used to monitor a range of vineyard and other crop conditions such as soil water or potassium content.

It is also proposed that the field data acquired by the system be utilised as input to advanced pattern recognition and machine learning techniques, forming a powerful tool to assist with automatic identification of plant health, crop and environmental conditions. We propose to deploy real pilots to validate the proof of concept of our solution in France and South Africa. 

FAST - FAster STronger cryptography

The objective is to develop new cryptographic tools to tackle the new challenge arising in order to achieve secure communications.

The first challenge is the rise of connected devices (the Internet of Things). These devices offer tremendous development opportunities, in particular in Africa; but they can only be used if they are secure. Their lack of memory and computing power makes any cryptographic computation very hard. The lack of security of these devices (like webcam) has already been used to mount very large denial of service attacks. In case of a cyberwar, these objects could probably compromise the internet infrastructure of whole countries.
The FAST team will improve algorithms on elliptic curve (which already are the fastest and more compact cryptosystems currently used) to better take into account the specific constraints of these devices. We will also use abelian varieties of greater dimension to be able to gain a factor two in the size of the base field.

The second challenge is the ongoing development of quantum computers, which would compromise all of classical cryptography. The team will study new protocols based on the isogeny graphs of super singular elliptic curves which are quantum resistant. The drawback of this new protocol (like the others quantum-resistant protocols) is that it takes considerably more time and memory than the classical one. We will improve these isogenies computations by studying the corresponding moduli spaces. Even if quantum computers are not there yet, for long term secret (like military ones) we already need to be prepared.

Eyes in the sky and on the ground are helping forest conservation in Cameroon

The highland rainforests of South West Cameroon are among the oldest forests on the continent. They comprise the richest flora and fauna in continental tropical Africa. The area is one of the world’s most important biodiversity hotspots. The region encompasses high levels of unique, as well as endangered species. These include the Cross River gorilla, Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees and forest elephants. Lire la suite