RITHMS project intends to boost the operational capacity of Police and Customs/Border Authorities in addressing the increasingly organised and poly-criminal nature of trafficking in cultural goods through research, technological innovation, outreach and training. Illicit trade in cultural heritage has progressed from a local phenomenon limited to the initiative of a few individuals to a highly remunerative source of income for criminal organisations and terrorist groups that have taken advantage of the opportunities offered by the web and social media to further expand an already flourishing market. Against this background, RITHMS proposes an interdisciplinary approach made necessary by the transnational character of this crime and its links to other criminal networks. The project will define a replicable strategy to counter the challenges in addressing the illicit trafficking of stolen/looted cultural goods and to investigate the mechanisms underpinning it, including its connection with organised crime. RITHMS will foster cross-cutting research bringing together all the domains relevant to expand the understanding of this type of crime (art market, criminology, law studies, forensic science, etc.). Inputs from these disciplines will inform the theoretical framework underlying an interoperable AI-based Platform able to identify criminal organised networks and to provide investigators with valuable intelligence on the activities and evolution of such networks. The Platform will be leveraging the methods of Social Network Analysis (SNA), a methodology that gives a way to better understand human behaviour through people's relations and interactions. Including four Police authorities, two Border Agencies, one Police School, SMEs, and researchers from SSH and ICT, RITHMS Consortium is well positioned to offer solutions to counteract more effectively organisations involved in illicit activities against cultural heritage.

Digital evidence is currently an integral part of criminal investigations, and not confined to pure cybercrime cases. Criminal behaviours like financial frauds, intellectual property theft, industrial espionage, and terrorist networks leverage the Internet and cyberspace. The very ubiquity of digital devices, e.g. smartphones, in modern society makes digital evidence extremely relevant for investigations about all kinds of criminal behaviour like murder, contraband activities, and people smuggling, to name a few. Due to its nature, the use of digital evidence in a court of law has always been challenging. It is critical that it should be accompanied by a proper chain of custody, guaranteeing its source and integrity. LOCARD aims to provide a holistic platform for chain of custody assurance along the forensic workflow, a trusted distributed platform allowing the storage of digital evidence metadata in a blockchain. Each node of LOCARD will be able to independently set its own permission policies and to selectively share access to digital evidence with other nodes when deemed necessary and upon proper authorization through fine-grained policies. LOCARD's modularity will also allow diverse actors to tailor the platform to their specific needs and role in the digital forensic workflow, from preparation and readiness, to collection, to analysis and reporting. LOCARD will have a crowdsource module to collect citizen reports of selected violations, a crawler to detect and correlate online deviant behaviour, and a toolkit for investigators that will assist them in collecting online and offline evidence. This will be powered by an immutable storage and an identity management system that will protect privacy and handle access to evidence data using a Trusted Execution Environment. Blockchain technology will not only guarantee that information about the evidence cannot be tampered with, but allow interoperability without the need for a trusted third party.

YAKSHA aims at reinforcing EU-ASEAN cooperation & building partnerships in the cybersecurity domain by developing a solution tailored to specific user and national needs, leveraging EU Know-How and local expertise. YAKSHA will develop and introduce the innovative concept of honeypots-as-a-service which will greatly enhance the process of gathering threat intelligence. It will enhance cybersecurity readiness levels for end users, help prevent cyber-attacks, mitigate cyber risks and better govern the whole cybersecurity process. YAKSHA is ideally positioned to secure global manufacturing supply chains, given its planned focus on IoT Security. YAKSHA will develop innovative methods for malware detection, collection and analysis, as well as design a specialised ontology to be used for long-term storage and analysis of the information, and deploy standard information formats and interfaces to facilitate interoperability. The YAKSHA software solution will be validated in real-world pilot projects in both regions, focusing on Vietnam & Greece, but with plans to expand the deployments to other countries. The test cases will be represented by complex end-users with articulated cybersecurity risks and will allow the consortium to gather feedback to be used later to bring the solution to the market. YAKSHA will develop a comprehensive business plan for the transition of the solution and complementary services to TRL9, leveraging the very strong ASEAN partners that are members of the consortium - including governmental organisations and leading end-users communities and associations with regional scope. As part of this effort, YAKSHA will build a whole ecosystem of partners around its solutions. This will contribute to enhancing cybersecurity skills in Europe and creating new positions for cybersecurity specialists in ASEAN. Moreover, the direct access to the all-important ASEAN market provided to partners will positively impact the competitiveness of European security industry