Strategic programs for advanced research and technology in Europe

In the domain of Cybersecurity Research and innovation, European scientists hold pioneering positions in fields such as cryptography, formal methods, or secure components. Yet this excellence on focused domains does not translate into larger-scale, system-level advantages. Too often, scattered and small teams fall short of critical mass capabilities, despite demonstrating world-class talent and results. Europe’s strength is in its diversity, but that strength is only materialised if we cooperate, combine, and develop common lines of research. Given today’s societal challenges, this has become more than an advantage – an urgent necessity. Various approaches are being developed to enhance collaboration at many levels. Europe’s framework programs have sprung projects in cybersecurity over the past thirty years, encouraging international cooperation and funding support actions. More recently, the Cybersecurity PPP has brought together public institutions and industrial actors around common roadmaps and projects. While encouraging, these efforts have highlighted the need to break the mould, to step up investments and intensify coordination. The SPARTA proposal brings together a unique set of actors at the intersection of scientific excellence, technological innovation, and societal sciences in cybersecurity. Strongly guided by concrete and risky challenges, it will setup unique collaboration means, leading the way in building transformative capabilities and forming world-leading expertise centres. Through innovative governance, ambitious demonstration cases, and active community engagement, SPARTA aims at re-thinking the way cybersecurity research is performed in Europe across domains and expertise, from foundations to applications, in academia and industry.

In this project Vicomtech's role is double, on the one hand we are the Spanish contact point of the network of partners, associated members and friends that form the Cyber Security Competence Centres Network of the project. In this same field we are responsible for defining the Common Infrastructure of Competence Centres (JCCI) that will support the catalogue of services developed in the project, and on the other hand, we participate in the SAFAIR programme dedicated to analysing the cyber security of artificial intelligence and machine learning models, both from the point of view of analysing their exposure surfaces to attacks, and from the point of view of developing defensive countermeasures that prevent them or, in the worst case, mitigate them.      

Project Information: Grant agreement ID: 830892. EU contribution: €15.999.913