The main goal of EU-CIP is to establish a novel pan European knowledge network for Resilient Infrastructures, which will enable policy makers to shape and produce data-driven evidence-based policies, while boosting the innovation capacity of Critical Infrastructures (CI) operators, authorities, and innovators (including SMEs). In this direction, the partners have already established the European Cluster for Securing Critical infrastructures (ECSCI), which brings together 22 projects that collaborate in CI Resilience. EU-CIP will leverage the capacity, organization, community, and achievements of the ECSCI cluster towards establishing an EU-wide knowledge network with advanced analytical and innovation support capabilities. The project’s analytics capabilities will fulfil the reporting requirements listed in the call in terms of the number and the (semestrial) frequency of the reports. To facilitate information collection and analysis, the project will establish a FAIR data observatory of research projects, research outcomes, technologies, standards, and policies. Along with analytical capabilities for evidence based policies, the project will organize and offer a rich set of innovation support services to EU projects and other innovators in CI security and resilience. These services will include training, support in business planning and access to finance, as well as support in the validation, standardization, and certification of novel solutions. The projects outcomes will be integrated and made available through a Knowledge Hub, which will provide a singly entry point to the EU-CIP results. EU-CIP will build a vibrant ecosystem of over 1000 stakeholders around this knowledge-hub. To animate and grow the project’s community, EU-CIP will execute an ambitious set of dissemination activities, including the establishment and organization of an annual conference on Critical Infrastructures Resilience, which will become a flagship event for critical infrastructures.

RIGOUROUS project aspires to identify and address the major cybersecurity, trust and privacy risks threatening the network, devices, computing infrastructure, and next generation of services. RIGOUROUS will address these challenges by introducing a new holistic and smart service framework leveraging new machine learning (ML) and AI mechanisms, which can react dynamically to the ever-changing threat surface on all orchestration layers and network functions. RIGOUROUS new smart service framework is capable of ensuring a secure, trusted and privacy-preserving environment for supporting the next generation of trustworthy continuum computing 6G services along the full device-edge-cloud-continuum on heterogenous multi-domain networks. This includes establishing compliance with the design of software (SW), protocols and procedures, as well as AI-governed mechanisms to cope with the security-related requirements in the full DevOps lifecycle, from the service onboarding up to the day-2 operations. Further the DevOps lifecycle spans from the prevention and detection of anomalies and/or intrusions at different levels (physical or cyber) based on violation of policies or rules, up to their mitigation and policy enforcement. It also comprises the incorporation of the human factor starting from the design until the human-in-the-loop concept in the whole orchestration. Additionally extensive research devoted to realizing advanced security enablers is carried out to bring automation and intelligence to the smart, but also secure, orchestration concept. In brief, RIGOUROUS targets the following key objectives: • Holistic Smart Service framework for securing the IoT-Edge-Cloud continuum lifecycle management • Human-Centric DevSecOps • Model-based and AI-driven Automated Security Orchestration, Trust Management and deployment • Advanced AI-driven Anomaly Detection, decision and Mitigation Strategies • Demonstration of a Set of Industrially Relevant Use Cases in Operational Envi

The 6G Smart Networks of the future will provide the high-performance and energy-efficient infrastructure on which next generation internet and other services can be developed and deployed. 6G will foster an Industry revolution and digital transformation and will accelerate the building of smart societies leading to quality-of-life improvements, facilitating autonomous systems, haptic communication and smart healthcare. To achieve the aforementioned objectives in a sustainable way, it is well understood that new approaches are needed in the way the telco infrastructures are architected, federated and orchestrated. These new approaches call for multi-stakeholder ecosystems that promote synergies among MNOs and owners of all kinds or computational and networking resources that will share the extraordinary costs of yet another generation upgrade from 5G to 6G, while facilitating new business models. It is clear, that the new architecture paradigms bring unprecedented complexity due to the sheer scale and heterogeneity of the orchestration domains involved, that should be matched by equally capable automation capabilities, thus 6G is aiming for the “holy grail” of pervasive AI-driven intelligence, termed as Native AI. However, the multi-stakeholder infrastructures foreseen in 6G as per the “network of networks” concept, will add a level of unprecedented management complexity due to the sheer scale and heterogeneity of the orchestration domains involved. 6G-INTENSE aims to abstract and federate all kinds of computational and communication resources under an internet-scale framework, that is governed by an intelligent orchestration paradigm, termed as DIMO.

Ever since the cloud-centric service provision started becoming incapable for efficiently supporting the emerging end-user needs, compute functionality has been shifted from the cloud, closer to the edge, or delegated to the user equipment at the far-edge. The resources and computing capabilities residing at those locations have been lately considered to collectively make-up a ‘compute continuum’, albeit its unproven assurance to securely accommodate end-to-end information sharing. The continuum-deployed workloads generate traffic that steers through untrusted HW and SW infrastructure (domains) of continuously changing trust-states. CASTOR develops and evaluates technologies to enable trustworthy continuum-wide communications. It departs from the processing of user-expressed high-level requirements for a continuum service, which are turned-to combinations of security needs and network resource requirements, referred to as CASTOR policies. The policies are subsequently enforced on the continuum HW and SW infrastructure to realise an optimised, trusted communication path delivering innovation-breakthroughs to the so-far unsatisfied need: a) for distributed (composable) attestation of the continuum nodes and subsequent elevation of individual outcomes to an adaptive (to changes) continuum trust quantification; b) for the derivation of the optimal path as a joint computation of the continuum trust properties and resources; c) for continuum infrastructure vendor-agnostic trusted path establishment, seamlessly crossing different administrative domains. The CASTOR will be evaluated in operational environments of 4 use-cases whereby varying types of security/safety-critical information is shared. Project innovations will be exhaustively assessed in 3 diverse application domains utilising the carefully-designed CASTOR testbed core for each case. Our results will provide experimental evidence for the CASTOR's efficiency and feed the incomplete trust-relevant (IETF) standards.

Improving the CI capacities at preparedness, detection and response phases requires the attention to the human factor as well as the collaboration of heterogeneous organisations involved in the CI development and operation, ensuring a continuum of care, just as it is done for other ICT systems with the adoption of SecDevOps approaches. DYNABIC Consortium believes that the adoption of defensive AI and novel approaches to continuous business risk management based on enhanced SecDevOps can drastically improve critical services resilience. Furthermore, AI-based self-healing and autonomous response automation can greatly help to achieve fast and efficient recovery and enable the provision of fully resilient critical services to European citizens. The strategic objective of DYNABIC is to increase the resilience and business continuity capabilities of European critical services in the face of advanced cyber-physical threats. This objective will be pursued by delivering new socio-technical methods, models and tools to support resilience through holistic business continuity risk management and control in operation, and dynamic adaptation of responses at system, human and organization planes. DYNABIC will deliver the DYNABIC Framework that will enable OES to predict, quantitatively assess and mitigate in real-time business continuity risks and their potential cascading effects. Furthermore, it will enable the dynamic autonomous adaptation of critical infrastructures to meet Resilience goals by the automatic optimization and orchestration of response strategies. The DYNABIC framework will be validated in two types of demonstrations: i) Smart Preparedness, prevention and Response to Business Disruption risks in 4 critical infrastructures and supply chains (EV charging stations, Critical transport services, Telco services, and Hospital services), and i) Smart Preparedness and Response to Cascading Business Disruption risks in interconnected CIs.