Current projects

WIDE: Widely Integrated Distributed Environment

WIDE project has been promoting research and development activities focused on transforming the Internet of the 20th Century which was the focus of research and development into the next generation Internet protocol, IPv6 (IP version 6) started towards the end of the 1990s, into an Internet for the 21st Century (IoT; Internet of Things) designed to connect all things and create a richer society. More specifically, they have been working on a range of projects, including the InternetCar project to link automobiles to the Internet, the RF-ID / Auto-ID project for object recognition and the Live E! and the Green University of Tokyo projects designed to link various sensors and actuators. While continuing to refine these activities, WIDE will also focus on new research and development projects in order to contribute to the realization of an Internet for the 21st Century, or IoT, to provide a link between all things, which is the ultimate goal of IPv6.

CAIDA: Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis

CAIDA is a collaborative undertaking among organizations in the commercial, government, and research sectors aimed at promoting greater cooperation in the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. CAIDA investigates practical and theoretical aspects of the Internet in order to

• provide macroscopic insights into Internet infrastructure, behavior, usage, and evolution
• foster a collaborative environment in which data can be acquired, analyzed, and (as appropriate) shared
• improve the integrity of the field of Internet science
• inform science, technology, and communications public policies.

SysSec: Managing Threats and Vulnerabilities in the Future Internet.

SysSec proposes to create a Network of Excellence in the field of Systems Security for Europe to play a leading role in changing the rules of the game. Capitalizing on the results of the recent FORWARD initiative and building on strong synergies with Industry and Policy makers, SysSec will work towards:

• creating a virtual center of excellence, to consolidate the Systems Security research community in Europe
• promoting cybersecurity education
• engaging a think-tank in discovering the threats and vulnerabilities of the Current and Future Internet,
• creating an active research roadmap in the area, and
• developing a joint working plan to conduct State-of-the-Art collaborative research.

MASSIF: MAnagement of Security information and events in Service Infrastructures

The main objective of MASSIF is to achieve a significant advance in the area of SIEM (Security Information and Event Management). On the base of proper multi-level event correlation MASSIF will provide innovation techniques in order to enable the detection of upcoming security threats and trigger remediation actions even before the occurrence of possible security incidences.

Thus, MASSIF will develop a new generation SIEM framework for service infrastructures supporting intelligent, scalable, and multi-level/multi-domain security event processing and predictive security monitoring.

ITEA2-ADAX: Attack Detection And Countermeasures Simulation

ADAX aims to study feasibility of solutions enabling to detect complex attacks against an information system working in its complex environment and to react smartly and quickly to those attacks with adapted countermeasures. Operators need to remediate to intrusions or vulnerabilities detected in an information system by selecting countermeasures. Unfortunately, it is currently impossible to assess the impact of a reaction (no quantitative assessment of the situation, need for faithful models, conflicts to solve between the numerous components of large systems in complex environments). ADAX will define solutions enabling proposal of reactions and means to assess impact of countermeasures before their enforcement on the information system security and on the services running above.

ICT-PSP ACDC: Advanced Cyber Defence Centre

ACDC will set up an European Advanced Cyber Defence Centre to fight botnets. ACDC’s approach is to

• foster an extensive sharing of information across Member States to improve the early detection of botnets,
• provide a complete set of solutions accessible online for mitigating on-going attacks
• use the pool of knowledge to create best practices that support organisations in raising their cyber-protection level
• create a European wide network of cyber-defence centres

ACDC will deploy a comprehensive set of national support centres throughout 8 Member States interconnected to the ACDC central clearing house. Through this networked approach, ACDC will also pave the way for a consolidated approach to protect organisations from cyber-threats and support mitigation of on-going attacks through easy access to an increasing pool of solutions.

Past projects

WOMBAT: Worldwide Observatory of Malicious Behaviors and Attack Threats

The WOMBAT project aims at providing new means to understand the existing and emerging threats that are targeting the Internet economy and the net citizens. To reach this goal, the proposal includes three key workpackages:

• real time gathering of a diverse set of security related raw data
• enrichment of this input by means of various analysis techniques, and
• root cause identification and understanding of the phenomena under scrutiny.

The acquired knowledge will be shared with all interested security actors (ISPs, CERTs, security vendors, etc.), enabling them to make sound security investment decisions and to focus on the most dangerous activities first. Special care will also be devoted to impact the level of confidence of the European citizens in the net economy by leveraging security awareness in Europe thanks to the gained expertise.

FORWARD is an initiative by the European Commission to promote the collaboration and partnership between Academia and Industry in their common goal of protecting Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructures. Communication networks and computers are under constant Cyber-threats from malicious users and organizations that use viruses, worms, spyware, botnets, spam, and phishing, to harm the European citizens and organizations.

The FORWARD initiative aims at identifying, networking, and coordinating the multiple research efforts that are underway in the area of Cyber-threats defenses, and leveraging these efforts with other activities to build secure and trusted ICT systems and infrastructures.

DEMONS: DEcentralized, cooperative, and privacy- preserving MONitoring for Trustworthiness
As an Integrating Project strategy, DEMONS aims at addressing all the key aspects essential in monitoring approaches for the Future Internet. DEMONS’ ultimate goal is to i) design a more scalable, flexible and autonomic monitoring infrastructure, ii) exploit monitoring intelligence distributed inside programmable traffic probes and mediating devices, iii) improve monitoring applications’ performance, capability effectiveness (detection, reporting, and mitigation) and deployment easiness, iv) operating in compliance with the customers’ privacy rights, and v) taking advantage of cross-domain cooperation mechanisms to permit improved defence against global scale cooperative threats and operational failures.