SERICS - SEcurity and RIghts in the CyberSpace

Cyber ​​attacks alarm the population, damage the economy and endanger the very safety of citizens when they affect the distribution networks of essential services such as health, energy, transport, and critical infrastructures of modern society. The SERICS project aims to identify the key security and privacy issues that cause societal harm, economic losses and hinder the adoption of smart city technologies, taking into account technical issues but also legal and societal aspects related to security and privacy.

The project is structured in ten Thematic Areas that correspond to the ten Spokes of the proposal:

• Thematic Area 1: Human, Social, and Legal Aspects, which main objective is to investigate how to create a compelling and secure Cyberspace by combining sound technological systems with strong and robust regulation of human behavior;
• Thematic Area 2: Misinformation and Fakes, which main objective is to design and develop innovative solutions to identify and manage information disorder threats that come alive through fake news and deep fake spreading;
• Thematic Area 3: Attacks and Defenses, which aims to analyze emerging attack methodologies and develop advanced methods for detecting attacks and identifying guidelines for the design of computer systems guaranteeing reduced vulnerabilities for new attack categories;
• Thematic Area 4: Operating Systems and Virtualization Security, which is concerned with developing high-level automated security services and innovative security assessment and assurance methodologies to support the secure-by-design development and verification of cloud, edge, and 5G applications;
• Thematic Area 5: Cryptography and Distributed Systems Security mainly concerned with research activities in cryptography and distributed system security domains;
• Thematic Area 6: Software and Platform Security, which first scientific goal is to provide an ecosystem where software developers can easily reason about software security to develop new formal techniques based on secure compilation and secure composition, to reduce the gap between formal models, essential to provide full guarantees of correctness, and actual implementations. The second scientific goal is to provide innovative solutions to protect the software supply chain, including the software management and development process;
• Thematic Area 7: Infrastructure Security, which general objective is the advancement of infrastructure security technologies;
• Thematic Area 8: Risk Management and Governance, which aims to contribute to the cyber resilience of future systems and services characterized by increasingly interconnected digital components that are intrinsically vulnerable, as required by the EU through NIS and NIS2, and by the Italian National Agency for Cybersecurity (ACN);
• Thematic Area 9: Securing Digital Transformation, which has the main objective of studying new approaches, methodologies, solutions, and tools that can provide adequate security guarantees for new application scenarios that are emerging today as a consequence of strong acceleration towards pervasive digital transformation;
• Thematic Area 10: Data Governance and Protection, which responds to the need for trust in the security and privacy of data, and solutions that guarantee correct protection and use of data by empowering the various actors involved in data sharing and using scenarios with control over their data, supporting shared data in a selective and secure way, at the same time guaranteeing functionality, efficiency, and scalability.

Scuola IMT is affiliated to:

• Spoke 2: Misinformation and Fakes;
• Spoke 4: Operating Systems and Virtualization Security; 
• Spoke 6: Software and Platform Security;
• Spoke 7: Infrastructure Security;