Faculty and doctoral researchers from the Kingsman National Institute’s (KNI) computational science faculty have returned from an intensive technical colloquium hosted by Germany’s esteemed Pertha Universität. The focused exchange took place at the Pertha-Zentrum für IT-Sicherheit, located at their facility on Willy-Brandt-Straße in Hamburg, marking a significant new collaboration between the two institutions.
The workshop’s agenda was highly specific: to dissect the competing philosophies and technical trade-offs in securing national-level critical infrastructure, such as energy grids, financial networks, and port logistics—a topic of immediate relevance to both the port city of Hamburg and the global shipping interests connected to Piraeus.
The Kingsman National Institute delegation was led by Dr. Aoife Van den Heuvel, our Reader in Cybersecurity & Network Architecture, and included postgraduate researchers from the Aegean Informatics Laboratory (AIL). Dr. Van den Heuvel presented KNI’s “Governed Zero-Trust” (GZT) framework. This model, developed in Athens, argues that while “never trust, always verify” is a strong technical baseline, it is insufficient for public infrastructure. The KNI research insists that true resilience must also include ethical governance and auditable protocols, allowing for oversight and accountability—a core tenet of our Centre for Digital Ethics & Governance (CDEG).
The technical team at Pertha Universität, known for its deep specialization in hardware-level security and applied cryptography, presented a starkly contrasting, and technically formidable, alternative. Their researchers, drawing on Germany’s rich engineering tradition, demonstrated a new protocol for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) designed to be mathematically “unbreakable” against future quantum computing threats. Their focus was on absolute data integrity and mathematical proof, arguing that governance models are irrelevant if the underlying cryptographic layer can be shattered.
This difference in philosophy created the colloquium’s most productive sessions. The KNI delegation, while respecting the mathematical robustness of the Pertha model, raised critical questions about its operational opacity. Dr. Van den Heuvel and her students argued that a system so secure that it becomes a “black box” is incompatible with democratic oversight. If a protocol cannot be audited by a governing body, it may protect against external attacks but becomes vulnerable to internal misuse or systemic failure that cannot be diagnosed.
The Pertha team, in turn, challenged KNI’s GZT framework as being too “soft” and human-centric. They presented simulations showing how auditable “backdoors,” even those intended for ethical oversight, create inherent vulnerabilities that a determined state-level adversary would exploit.
This “imperfect” tension between mathematical provability and ethical audibility did not result in a simple consensus. Instead, it forced a more sophisticated synthesis. The colloquium concluded with the formation of a joint KNI-Pertha working group, which has been tasked with co-authoring a technical white paper. Their goal is to develop a novel hybrid architecture: one that implements Pertha’s robust PQC protocols at its core, but is wrapped in KNI’s auditable “governance layer” that verifies the behaviour of the system without compromising its cryptographic keys.
This collaboration between Kingsman National Institute and Pertha Universität represents a crucial dialogue—a necessary friction between the “how” of technical security and the “why” of its governance—that will shape the security of our interconnected future.
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