Ever since the cloud-centric service provision started becoming incapable for efficiently supporting the emerging end-user needs, compute functionality has been shifted from the cloud, closer to the edge, or delegated to the user equipment at the far-edge. The resources and computing capabilities residing at those locations have been lately considered to collectively make-up a ‘compute continuum’, albeit its unproven assurance to securely accommodate end-to-end information sharing. The continuum-deployed workloads generate traffic that steers through untrusted HW and SW infrastructure (domains) of continuously changing trust-states. CASTOR develops and evaluates technologies to enable trustworthy continuum-wide communications. It departs from the processing of user-expressed high-level requirements for a continuum service, which are turned-to combinations of security needs and network resource requirements, referred to as CASTOR policies. The policies are subsequently enforced on the continuum HW and SW infrastructure to realise an optimised, trusted communication path delivering innovation-breakthroughs to the so-far unsatisfied need: a) for distributed (composable) attestation of the continuum nodes and subsequent elevation of individual outcomes to an adaptive (to changes) continuum trust quantification; b) for the derivation of the optimal path as a joint computation of the continuum trust properties and resources; c) for continuum infrastructure vendor-agnostic trusted path establishment, seamlessly crossing different administrative domains. The CASTOR will be evaluated in operational environments of 4 use-cases whereby varying types of security/safety-critical information is shared. Project innovations will be exhaustively assessed in 3 diverse application domains utilising the carefully-designed CASTOR testbed core for each case. Our results will provide experimental evidence for the CASTOR's efficiency and feed the incomplete trust-relevant (IETF) standards.

Air pollution is a significant global concern causing an estimated 4.2 million deaths annually due to diseases related to poor air quality. Climate change is exacerbating air quality issues and posing unprecedented challenges to the existing air quality monitoring systems, which mainly utilize sparse and expensive terrestrial stations and satellites, leading to limited accuracy and flexibility. To address these challenges, REFINE aims to form an international, multidisciplinary, and cross-sectoral consortium with world-leading researchers to create a novel real-time fine-grained air quality monitoring system empowered by advanced technologies in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Wireless Networking. Specifically, REFINE will pioneer research and innovations (R&I) on ground-breaking technologies including: 1) a robust and scalable system architecture for aerial-terrestrial air quality monitoring; 2) intelligent and efficient multi-UAV cooperation strategies for dynamic and flexible area coverage; 3) ultra-resilient and secure aerial-terrestrial networking schemes for reliable and efficient data transmission; 4) lightweight and robust AI methods for accurate and real-time air quality analysis. REFINE will establish a long-term cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral knowledge-sharing platform with competent and complementary expertise in Computer Science, Environmental Science, and Communication Engineering. The researchers involved will be trained through substantial R&I actions and well-planned networking activities at both European and global levels to enrich their skills and enhance their career perspectives. REFINE will significantly contribute to achieving the EU’s zero-pollution ambition and enhancing European competitiveness, through transforming the current air quality monitoring systems into a new generation, which is able to provide real-time intelligent monitoring of vast rural areas with higher precision and efficiency.

The success of 5G technologies depends closely on their ability to attract vertical stakeholders, seeking the move of their services from cloud to the edge to meet unique KPIs. 5G-INDUCE project is based on the belief that such attractiveness requires vertical stakeholders and Network Application (nApp) developers to be able to smoothly deploy and manage applications in distributed 5G network environments, in a secure fashion and with strict KPI requirements. 5G-INDUCE relies on the deployment of an open ETSI NFV compatible 5G orchestration platform for the deployment of advanced 5G nApps. The platform’s unique features provide the capability to the nApp developers to define and modify the application requirements while the underlay intelligent OSS can expose the network capabilities to the end users on the application level without revealing any infrastructure related information. This process enables an application-oriented network management and optimization approach that is in line with the operator’s role as manager of its own facilities, while it offers the operational environment to any developers and service providers through which tailored made applications can be designed and deployed, for the benefit of vertical industries and without any indirect dependency through a cloud provider. The project focuses on the Industry 4.0 vertical sector, as one of the fastest growing and most impactful sectors in European economy with high potentials for service development SMEs and with the capability to tackle all diverse cases of service requirements. The platform is integrated over 3 5G Experimentation Facilities in Spain, Greece, and Italy, and extended with links towards specific Industries, for the showcasing of nApps in real 5G environment. The consortium includes all the required stakeholders (MNOs, Industries, System integrators and SMEs) from the benefited business sectors evaluated in the project, while significant part of the work (>50%) is conducted by innovative SMEs.

The more complex and critical that many systems becoming nowadays, the more they are developed by integrating different (sub-)components, even third-party hardware/software components. With the pressure of time to market, and the ever-evolving security threats, getting more complicated than ever with the breakthroughs in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), how to enable more secure development and integrations of critical systems to be assured for security? These huge challenges must be addressed to make “secure services, processes and products, as well as to robust digital infrastructures capable to resist and counter cyber-attacks and hybrid threats” as called for in the EC’s Strategic Plan 2021-2024. Addressing exactly these challenges, the overall objective of SECASSURED is to deliver innovative security engineering solutions with (AI-based) security services to achieve novel holistic assurance-driven security engineering, capable of (1) increasing software, hardware and supply chain security by identifying cybersecurity and regulatory risks while integrating (both commercial and open-source) components, even third party ones, (2) providing virtual, secure environments for the automated assessment of system components including AI components and their secure integration, and (3) continuous assurance-driven security engineering with a holistic toolbox of (AI-based) security services. It paves the way of secure continuous system integration of (third-party) components, including AI components, across the computing continuum, and implements EC's evolving security and privacy regulations, as well as the strategy of human-centric AI.