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UBITECH co-organizes clustering workshop in future proofing supply chains

The Clustering Workshop, entitled “Future Proofing and Certifying Supply Chains”, co–organized by EU-funded projects ASSURED and CYRENE, wherein UBITECH participates as Technical Coordinator, aims at bringing together projects that target Supply Chain Security, Resilience and Certification aspects, experts, members and consultants from standardization and certification bodies for exploring synergies and identifying actions that can be pursued in common.

Cybersecurity is a complex ecosystem targeting the protection of all building blocks of IoT and next-generation smart connectivity “Systems of Systems”. For this reason, it is of paramount importance to have such networked information systems designed having security, privacy, data protection, fault tolerance and accountability in mind from their design phase. However, this is not an easy task at hand – the restricted environment of many IoT devices and CPSoS makes the deployment of complex security solutions rather challenging and a continuous arms race for balancing several trade-offs such as security vs safety, security vs privacy, security vs trust, security vs usability, security vs cost, to name a few. It is now understood that new solutions cannot be rolled out unless all these challenges have been overcome and they are properly secured and they ensure user’s privacy.

Towards this direction, we already have a rich trove of algorithms, tools and mechanisms to ensure the security and trustworthiness of ICT systems and both industry and academia are allocating a lot of resources for enhancing such mechanisms taking into account future-proof, advanced cryptographic means, trusted computing, certification and auditing schemes for connected devices, Blockchain for secure data sharing, multi-factor authentication hardware and software solutions, etc.

However, in spite all the progress made, how close are we to feeling safe in cyberspace and truly protecting all algorithms, hardware and software across the entire supply chain? How well do we do in addressing real-world security and privacy (S&P) problems? Or, to put it slightly differently, how could we best address them? The goal of this workshop is to foster collaboration and discussion among cyber-security researchers and practitioners, through bringing together a number of EU security initiatives, better understand the various facets and trade-offs of cybersecurity and how new technologies and algorithms might impact existing or future security models. In particular, representatives from eight EU-funded research projects will participate, discuss about supply chain cybersecurity and identify complementarities and potential synergies.