Towards a secure trading of aviation CO₂ allowance

The growth of world air traffic has been accompanied by a significant increase of its environmental impact, including CO₂ emissions, which has forced the European Union to include aviation in its Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). The EU ETS is a market-based mechanism that obliges airlines to buy or sell carbon permits, thus forcing them to share confidential information with their competitors in an auction-based market. Disclosure of confidential information will be one of the main barriers for the ETS adoption. In this contribution we describe the design and implementation of a Secure Multi-party Computation framework, capable of overcoming these barriers. The framework runs as an online, cloud-based computational service for performing CO₂ trading securely without the need of sharing business information. Benefits and limitations of the proposed approach are discussed, as well as the challenges to be overcome towards an operational implementation.