ECHO delivers an organized and coordinated approach to improve proactive cyber defence of the European Union, through effective and efficient multi-sector collaboration. The Partners will execute on a 48-month work plan to develop, model and demonstrate a network of cyber research and competence centres, with a central competence at the hub. The Central Competence Hub serves as the focal point for the ECHO Multi-sector Assessment Framework enabling multi-sector dependencies management, provision of an ECHO Early Warning System, an ECHO Federation of Cyber Ranges and management of an expanding collection of Partner Engagements. The ECHO Multi-sector Assessment Framework refers to the analysis of challenges and opportunities derived from sector specific use cases, transversal cybersecurity needs analysis and development of inter-sector Technology Roadmaps involving horizontal cybersecurity disciplines. The Early Warning System, Federation of Cyber Ranges and Inter-sector Technology Roadmaps will then be subject of Demonstration Cases incorporating relevant involvement of inter-dependent industrial sectors. The ECHO Cyber-skills Framework provides the foundation for development of cybersecurity education and training programmes including a common definition of transversal and inter-sector skills and qualifications needed by cybersecurity practitioners. The ECHO Cybersecurity Certification Scheme provides a sector specific and inter-sector process for cybersecurity certification testing of new technologies and products resulting from the proposed technology roadmaps. The project will develop and operate under an ECHO Governance Model, by which the efforts across the EU Network of Cybersecurity Competence Centres can be coordinated and optimized to provide lasting and sustainable excellence in cybersecurity skills development; research and experimentation; technology roadmaps delivery; and certified security products for improved cybersecurity resilience.

The overarching goal of INCOGNITO is to combine state-of-the-art technologies in a platform that will allow users to easily understand what is needed to access online services with respect to their privacy and be able to prove specific attributes of their identity or their whole identity. We build on top of the framework that is being developed under the ReCRED project where we use advanced mobile software in order to convert online and physical identity proofs into validated and cryptographically strong proofs of identities that can be used for getting access to Online Services. INCOGNITO has the following objectives: 1.Design and implement an infrastructure that supports qualified anonymity (QA) by leveraging state of the art cryptographic credentials schemes as well as Federated Login solutions. 2.Design and implement an Identity Acquisition and Management platform that will allow the user to quickly and securely acquire identity attributes from Physical ID documents and Online Identities. 3.Design and implement an advanced UI/UX AI-based assistant that will guide and inform the user about aspects of his identity management as well as possible actions to take. 4.Evaluate the results of the project through two pilot activities. To achieve these objectives an inter-sectorial and interdisciplinary secondment program for Experienced and Early Stage Researchers that fosters knowledge exchange is proposed. Academic partners will offer their expertise on online identity acquisition and management, machine-learning algorithms and user experience assessment. Industry partners will offer their expertise on state-of-the-art IT security technologies, production-grade development processes, exposure to industrial research environment and relevant business issues and data.

ReCRED’s ultimate goal is to promote the user’s personal mobile device to the role of a unified authentication and authorization proxy towards the digital world. ReCRED adopts an incrementally deployable strategy in two complementary directions: extensibility in the type and nature of supported stakeholders and services (from local access control to online service access), as well as flexibility and extensibility in the set of supported authentication and access control techniques; from widely established and traditional ones to emerging authentication and authorization protocols as well as cryptographically advanced attribute-based access control approaches. Simplicity, usability, and users privacy is accomplished by: i) hiding inside the device all the complexity involved in the aggregation and management of multiple digital identifiers and access control attribute credentials, as well as the relevant interaction with the network infrastructure and with identity consolidation services; ii) integrating in the device support for widespread identity management standards and their necessary extensions; and iii) controlling the exposure of user credentials to third party service providers. ReCRED addresses key security and privacy issues such as resilience to device loss, theft and impersonation, via a combination of: i) local user-to-device and remote device-to-service secure authentication mechanisms; ii) multi-factor authentication mechanisms based on behavioral and physiological user signatures not bound to the device; iii) usable identity management and privacy awareness tools; iv) usable tools that offer the ability for complex reasoning of authorization policies through advanced learning techniques. ReCRED’s viability will be assessed via four large-scale realistic pilots in real-world operational environments. The pilots will demonstrate the integration of the developed components and their suitability for end-users, so as to show their TRL7 readiness.