International Co-operation in Trustworthy,
Secure and Dependable ICT infrastructures

An international workshop is being held in Seoul, Korea on 25 - 26th January 2010 to enlighten cooperative research challenges to ensure Trustworthy ICT, including trust, security, privacy and protection against cyber attacks.

The workshop is hosted by Korea Institute of Information Security and Cryptology (KIISC) and Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology (KEIT), INCO-TRUST project, supported by European Commission DGINFSO Unit F5, ICT Trust and Security Research and sponsored by Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE).

The program and additional information can be found here.

The Future Internet Assembly (FIA ’09) conference was held in Stockholm, Sweden at the Kista Science City over 23-24th November 2009. FIA'09 Stockholm brought together over 300 stakeholders in the Future Internet developments from policy makers, industry and academia, coming from mainly from EU member countries and abroad. There were a number of sessions dedicated to ICT Trust and Security topics including eID approaches for the Future Internet and How to Measure Trust. The final session materials and slides can be found at the Trust and Identity Caretakers¹ wiki.

¹ An FIA “caretaker” coordinates the activities in the cross domain clusters within the FIA and between projects that are signatory to the Bled Declaration .The Future Internet Assembly (FIA ’09) conference was held in Stockholm and Kista Science City over 23-24th November 2009. FIA'09 Stockholm brought together over 300 stakeholders in the Future Internet developments from policy makers, industry and academia, coming from mainly from EU member countries and abroad. There were a number of sessions dedicated to Trust and Security topics including eID approaches for the Future Internet and How to Measure Trust. The final session materials and slides can be found at the Trust and Identity Caretakers wiki.

All of the INCO-TRUST partners participated to the FIA Trust and Identity  workshop held in Brussels on 7th October 2009. The purpose of the Workshop was to prepare for the Trust and Identity Sessions at the Future Internet Assembly Stockholm event being held in on 23 - 24th November 2009.

The full agenda and slides of the 7th October workshop can be found here. 

INCO-TRUST has published the Pan-European - Global Alignment of Trust, Security and Dependability report presenting an analysis of stakeholders, research funding instruments and ongoing research efforts carried out in Europe, USA, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia. The objective of the report is to support trust, security and dependability (TSD) alignment in these countries and to help identifying opportunities for collaboration amongst programme management and research organisations. Additionally, this report will contribute to a better understanding of the building mechanisms for international cooperation.

RISEPTIS (Research and Innovation for SEcurity, Privacy and Trustworthiness in the Information Society) is a high-level advisory board in ICT research on security and trust aiming at providing visionary guidance on policy and research challenges in the field of security and trust in the Information Society. The board recently published their final report here.

Meetings were held between the European Commission's Mr. Jacques Bus, Head of Unit of DG INFSO F5 Trust and Security Unit and the Japan Science and Technology Agency during and following the 2nd Japan EU Symposium on the "New Generation Network" and the "Future Internet" held 13-14th October 2009 in Tokyo, Japan.

Starting in June 2009, the INCO-Trust project supported Mr. Bus in coordinating with the Japan and Science Technology Agency (JST) to begin organising joint EU-Japan meetings and site visits around this event. These interactions resulted in a number of fruitful exchanges, including a meeting with the International Department of the JST, Center for Research and Development Strategy (CRDS in JST/MEXT) and meeting with the Director of ICT (MIC). Within these meetings, an interest was expressed to include the areas of Trust and security and dependability in their formal scheme of EU – Japan cooperation, where now only direct cooperation with certain member states is implemented. In particular, the areas of Trust and security with its horizontal impact and interdisciplinary attention was seen as attractive for CRDS/JST, as it would be more the responsibility of MIC to work on pure ICT research and cooperation.

On 23rd September 2009, a meeting was held in Washington, D.C. between the European Commission DG INFSO Head of Unit of F5, Jacques Bus, and National Science Foundation. During the meeting, the NSF delegation confirmed their commitment to working together with the EU to create an international community that develops a common research agenda together in the Trust and Security areas needed by all concerned to avoid needless duplication or needed for interoperability of different systems worldwide (some examples discussed were eID and privacy). Some of the preferred subjects to consider in upcoming workshops included trustworthy international data transfer and security models for the Future Internet.

Inco-Trust participated as a keynote speaker and rapporteur in the EU-Brazil (EUBR 2009 ) workshop held at the University of São Paulo from 8th to 9th of September 2009. The workshop goal was to promote collaboration, idea and exchange of experiences and joint research on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) between Brazilian and European Union Academic and Scientific Communities and industries. The Workshop had sessions on a number of important challenges with ICT concerning Future Internet (including Security, Privacy and Trust), e-infrastructure, Microelectronics/Microsystems and Embedded System & Control. Slides presented by Jim Clarke can be found here. A short report of the session can be found here. 

 The latest issue of the newsletter about ICT R&D in Trust and Security from the Unit F5 of the Directorate General Information Society and Media of the European Commission can be found here. Previous newsletters can be found at the following website.

On June 18 2009, an information day was organised by Unit F5 “Trust and Security“ for the objective 1.4 Trustworthy ICT in view of the forthcoming Call 5 to open on July 31st. Participants had the ability to present a few slides during the proposers forum or share a project concept with participants. All the presentations of the day are now available here.

The Serenity Project (System Engineering for Security and Dependability) held a successful Serenity Day on 17 June 2009. For those who attended, the project would appreciate if you would take the time to fill their assessment questionnaire.  The presentations are available for download.  The Serenity Day marks the first step in the direction of the Serenity objective: establishing and building a Security Engineering Community.

In this regard, a first working group of 4 Serenity members led by Antonio Maña has started to prepare a first draft of the Security Engineering Manifesto, according to the feedbacks received during the Serenity Day. This document will be circulated for open discussion to the Serenity Day participants by the end of June 2009. This work is also open to the Security Engineers and IT experts willing to take part in the discussion: they will have to register on the Serenity Forum Website,  The Serenity Forum Website will keep the community informed on the advancement of the Manifesto and is intended to become the online meeting point of the Serenity Engineering Community thanks to various functionalities and services: Security Patterns Library, Users Forum (including a Manifesto thread), Serenity Handbook, etc. Have a look at it!

 On 20 – 21st May 2009, the next in the series of INCO-TRUST International Co-operation Workshops was held in Sydney, Australia. The workshop theme was Privacy, Trust and Security “On the path to European engagement”. The workshop’s Australian sponsors included National ICT Australia (NICTA ), Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO ) and Information Integrity Solutions (IIS ) with strong participation from multiple Australian universities as detailed later. The agenda of the workshop can be found here.

The workshop was a dedicated opportunity for the EU to present the future work program in ICT Trust and Security (Call 5) and, in particular, the directly relevant international co-operation IN-CO Objective 9.2 : “Supplements to support International Cooperation between Ongoing Projects in Trust and Security”. This objective is aimed at supplementing international cooperation between running FP7 ICT projects (applicable to running Integrated Projects (IPs) and Specific Targeted Research Projects (STREPS) within ICT WP 2007-08 along with 'partner projects' funded by agencies in other industrialised countries including Australia that has an appropriate S&T Agreement with the EU.

In order to fast-track the process of bringing together the projects between the countries, the ongoing ICT-FP7 IPs and STREPs were presented to the Australian researchers engaged in ICT Trust and Security research and the INCO-TRUST project will act as a “bridge” to further mutual cooperation between the countries. Likewise, during a round table session, the Australian researchers presented the projects that they are engaged including Trust and Security for Spatial environments and Peer to Peer, intelligent transport systems (vehicular and maritime), grid energy systems, resource frugal environments e.g., sensors, public safety recovery systems, content distribution, performance evaluation, formal methods for protocol verification, collaborative service and dynamic coalitions, amongst others.

The well attended workshop included Australian researchers and program management from NICTA, CSIRO, IIS, Macquarie University, University New South Wales, University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, amongst others. Given the existing S&T agreement across EC & Australia, the meeting also resulted in the Australian researchers defining a consolidated approach to the Australian funding organizations such as ARC (Australian Research Council) to tangibly help facilitate EU-Australian projects.

The follow up to the event will be the Australian researchers are to provide the project with a short summary of their profiles and project descriptions and these will be mapped and promoted to the relevant EU ICT-FP7 projects interested in availing of the supplemental Objective 9.2.

For those attending FIA Prague, please note another highly relevant and interesting event immediately following the FIA Prague event called Fair for Trustworthy ICT Research on 14 May 2009 in Olomouc (CZ), which is accessible via a high speed train from Prague. This event aims at bringing together people interested in ICT Trust an Security Research to discuss research issues, meet prospective partners and develop ideas for possible project proposals in view of the upcoming call for proposals.

The European Commission will be present to give the necessary support and explanation to prospective proposers.

Please find attached a leaflet about the event. Please visit the event website for more information, including agenda and registration details.

The FIA '09 Conference and Workshop of the Future Internet Assembly will be held in Prague on 11-13 May, 2009. One year after the "Bled Declaration" launching a European approach to the Future of the Internet, and the conference in Bled establishing the Future Internet Assembly, this conference in Prague aims to review the strategic orientations and trends governing the future societal and economic developments of on-line Internet and Mobile societies.

For the latest ongoing preparatory work by the FIA community, check out this workspace.  The conference on 11 May is open to everyone and free of charge! The FIA workshop on 12-13 May is by invitation only and will bring together the 94 projects which agreed to work jointly on the Future Internet under the framework of FIA.

If you are one of the invited projects, you can circulate this invitation widely within your project. However please note, that the conference organisers, CESNET, has made arrangements to welcome up to 3 representatives per project. They must be duly registered prior to the event at the conference website.

For those attending FIA Prague, please note another highly relevant and interesting event immediately following the FIA Prague event called Fair for Trustworthy ICT Research on 14 May 2009 in Olomouc (CZ), which is accessible via a high speed train from Prague. This event aims at bringing together people interested in ICT Trust an Security Research to discuss research issues, meet prospective partners and develop ideas for possible project proposals in view of the upcoming call for proposals.

The European Commission will be present to give the necessary support and explanation to prospective proposers.

Please find attached a leaflet about the event. Please visit the event website for more information, including agenda and registration details.

 An ITU-T Workshop on "New challenges for Telecommunication Security Standardizations" was held in Geneva, Switzerland on the 9 - 10th of February 2009. One of the sessions dealt with Secure applications (Session 4) and dealt with many topics of Security and the Future Internet. Session 4 was chaired by Dr. Heung-Youl Youm, Professor, Soonchunhyang University. Korea.

Professor Michel Riguidel represented the INCO-TRUST project during this session and his presentation can be found here. 

A link to ITU-T security workshop containing the all the presentations can be found here. 

A link to a side event on Information Security in WTSA'08 can be found here. 

The first International Workshop of the project is being held in Madrid, Spain on 31st March 2009 - 1st April 2009.

The workshop is an invitation only workshop whose overall theme will be International Co-operation in Trustworthy ICT Systems: Security, Privacy and Trust in Large-Scale Global Networks & Services. The Terms of Reference and the Draft program are available by clicking on Workshops in the left side main menu.

The “2nd EU-Korea Cooperation Forum on ICT Research” was held on Dec. 1-2, 2008 in Brussels, Belgium. It was co-organised by the European Commission (EC) (Directorate-General Information Society and Media; DG INFSO) and the Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE) of the Republic of Korea (ROK) with the support of the COJAK FP7/ICT project. An event report can be found here .

The Inco-Trust project was represented in a session on the Security and Trust in Networks and Services by Professor Michel Riguidel. A presentation made by Prof. Riguidel can be found here . 

Within Call 4 and Call 5 of the ICT work program (WP) 2009-2010, there is a new research Objective titled: "Objective ICT-2009.9.2: Supplements to Support International Cooperation between Ongoing Projects".

This objective is aiming at International cooperation between running FP7 ICT projects (applicable to certain instrument/projects within Trustworthy ICTs Work Programme Objectives: ICT-2007.1.4, 1.7) along with 'partner projects' funded by agencies in other industrialised countries that have an appropriate S&T Agreement with the EU or are member countries in the Intelligent Manufacturing Systems (IMS) initiative.

This objective provides you and/or your partners with an opportunity to engage in International collaboration activities by carrying out, in some of the technical areas of your project, joint R&D work with partners from other industrialised countries of the world. For this to happen, you would first need to submit a supplementary proposal that qualifies under ICT Objective 9.2.

DG INFSO Unit F5 Trust and Security has put together an Information package on Objective 9.2 consisting of the following:

1. Excerpts from the ICT WP text describing Objective 9.2 and from the Guide of Applicants on "Completion of Proposal Part B for Objective 9.2".
2. A number of slides briefly presenting Objective 9.2 and the instructions for preparing Part B of a proposal can be found here. Most importantly, this enclosure comprises some information on running projects and initial contact points in some other industrialised countries like the USA, Australia, Canada, Japan or Korea. The contact points from these countries in this enclosure are well aware of the Objective 9.2 and of the possibilities of cooperation with the EU.
3. Two EXCEL files with some more information on Security and Trust projects running in Canada and in Japan.