Chronix: Verifiable Data Provenance for the Edge-Cloud Continuum
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Head of the Group
NameProf. Dr. Florian Tschorsch
Chair of Privacy and Security
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Chronix is a collaborative research project that explores how to ensure trustworthy, verifiable data flows in distributed edge computing environments. As edge computing and edge-cloud architectures increasingly enable autonomous, intelligent applications—from connected vehicles to industrial monitoring—ensuring data integrity, provenance, and auditability becomes a critical challenge.
In these decentralized systems, data is processed close to its source on heterogeneous devices that may operate with limited connectivity and without centralized oversight. Chronix addresses these challenges by combining two foundational technologies:
- Content addressing, which uses cryptographic hashes to uniquely and immutably identify data
- Distributed timestamping, which anchors data and events in time through decentralized, tamper-evident mechanisms
Together, these techniques provide assurances of integrity, provenance, and temporal validity, supporting the design of systems that are verifiable and resilient to manipulation.
Chronix is developed in close collaboration with Telekom MMS as part of the broader European initiative IPCEI-CIS (Important Project of Common European Interest on Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure and Services). The project contributes to the creation of sovereign, interoperable, and federated components for the European edge-cloud continuum, supporting data sovereignty, cross-domain trust, and accountability in future digital infrastructures.