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

The Trust and Security communities were represented during two sessions during the recent FIA Valencia event. The session ‘Foundations of Trust in the Future Internet' explored the human and technical foundations of trust in the Future Internet with the intent of developing a roadmap for future cross domain research. In his introductory remarks, session chair Volkmar Lotz stated  "there was a need to come back to the foundations of Trust in the Future Internet because security and trust is really ‘cross-cutting' topic, and must be addressed from many different angles to achieve confidence and trust in the services and infrastructure of FI to readily participate in a digital life and digital society".   Four invited speakers each addressed a key topic for the Future Internet:

·         Security Challenges for the Future Internet, Prof. Evangelos Markatos, FORTH and University of Crete 

·         Provenance in the Future Internet, Dr. Jose Manuel Gomez-Perez, R&D Director, iSOCO

·         Economics of Trust and Security, Dr Simon Shiu, System Security Lab, HP Labs  

·        Legal frameworks for Trust in the Future Internet, Mireille Hildbrandt, Associate Professor and Senior Researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Erasmus University Rotterdam.

During Architecture Session 2 on Concrete results for the Future Internet, the work undertaken during the Identity session of FIA Stockholm and follow up activities related to a sustainable ID Framework for the Future Internet were presented by Amardeo Sarma of NEC Laboratories Europe. The coverage of Privacy enhancing ID management across the layers has been recognised as a good example of collaboration across the work streams of the Future Internet Assembly. The Trust and Identity caretakers, along with the relevant researchers, in the final plenary session of FIA Stockholm decided that this topic was mature enough to pursue in a more results oriented way. This culminated in a focussed "interim FIA workshop" held on 3rd March 2010 dedicated to the topic, whose principle results were highlighted in a presentation entitled Sustainable Identity Framework for the Future Internet during the Towards a Future Internet Architecture Session 2 (Concrete results are already available).  The full report of this interim workshop is available at the Trust and Identity caretakers wiki. The presentation highlighted the consensus amongst the participants of the necessity to leverage existing privacy solutions of PrimeLife, TAS3 and SWIFT towards privacy enabled identity systems and infrastructures in both the short term (PPP) and longer term (FP7/FP8) with a distinct goal of sustaining better privacy and security than available today and making privacy a European trademark of the 21st century.

The Trust and Identity "caretakers" of FIA are Nick Wainwright, Jim Clarke, Volkmar Lotz and Michel Riguidel. Their main role is coordinating the activities within and between all the cross domain clusters and are intermediaries between the European Commission and the FI projects that are signatories to the Bled Declaration.

A Conference on Trust in the Information Society, jointly organized by "F5" Trust & Security Unit (DG Information Society and Media, European Commission), INTECO (The National Institute of Communication Technologies) and eSEC-AETIC (Spanish Technology Platform for Security, Trust and Dependability), will take place on 10-11 February, in Léon, Spain.

The programme is fully dedicated to the area of Trustworthy ICT; hence including security, trust, identity, privacy and data protection at the network as well as the services level. It will give particular attention to technology, legal, industrial and societal aspects of current developments towards a Web-based world. Special attention will also be given to the findings of the Advisory Board for Research and Innovation for Security, Privacy and Trustworthiness in the Information Society (RISEPTIS - click to get final report ). High level experts from Public Administrations, Industry and Research will speak on the challenges in RTD and policy to ensure an Information Society which will be secure and trustworthy. Please do not forget to register for the event.

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.