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.

EU-HYBNET is a Pan-European network of security practitioners, stakeholders, academics, industry players, and SME actors across EU collaborating with each other in ever increasing numbers to counter hybrid threats. EU-HYBNET aims to build an empowered, sustainable network beyond the scope of the project through its on-going association with a key partner, The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, and it will: define common requirements that can fill knowledge gaps, deal with performance needs, and enhance capabilities of innovation endeavours; monitor significant developments in research and innovation; deliver recommendations for uptake and industrialisation of the most promising innovations that address the needs of practitioners, and determine associated priorities for standardisation; establish conditions for enhanced interaction among its members; and persistently strive to increase its membership and continually build network capacity through knowledge exchange incl. exercises. EU-HYBNET's principal objectives align with the H2020 SEC-SU-GM01-2019 call and are of crucial relevance to it. A technology and innovations watch, facilitated by scientific research, will ensure smooth execution of searching, monitoring, identifying and assessing innovations both under development or already proven, including the level of technology readiness for uptake or industrialisation. EU-HYBNET will bring together practitioners and stakeholders to identify and define their most urgent requirements for countering hybrid threats by undertaking an in-depth analysis of gaps and needs and prioritising those that are crucial to address through effective research and innovation initiatives, including arranging training and exercise events to test the most promising innovations (technical and social) which will lead to creation of a roadmap for success and solid recommendations for uptake, industrialisation and standarisation across the European Union.

ENSURESEC is a sociotechnical solution for safeguarding the Digital Single Market’s e-commerce operations against cyber and physical threats. It combines an automatic, rigorous, distributed and open-source toolkit for protecting e-commerce, with monitoring of the impact of threats in physical space and a campaign for training SMEs and citizens aimed at creating awareness and trust. ENSURESEC addresses the whole gamut of modern e-commerce, from standard physical products purchased online and delivered via post, to entirely virtual products or services delivered online. It addresses threats ranging from maliciously modifying web e-commerce applications or rendering them unavailable to legitimate customers, to delivery issues or fraud committed by insiders or customers. It achieves this by focusing on the common software and physical sensor interfaces that sit along the e-commerce, payment and delivery ecosystem. At technical level, it integrates proven state-of-the-art inductive (machine learning) with deductive (formal methods) reasoning tools and techniques so that e-commerce operations are protected by design, as well as through continuous monitoring, response, recovery and mitigation measures at run-time. Importantly, trust of the infrastructure’s operations among its users is established, benefiting from distributed ledger technology ensuring transparency of the operations and that information has not been modified. Although ENSURESEC innovations are applicable to any critical infrastructure that relies and is monitored by networked software systems, its design and integration philosophy make it uniquely prepared to protect distributed and evolving e-commerce infrastructures with its various forms of payment and delivery (virtual, online and physical). ENSURESEC also enhances citizens’ resilience to threats and their trust in e-commerce companies, especially SMEs, thus contributing towards the vision of a reliable and trusted digital single market.

The increasing complexity of security challenges combined with the accumulation of significant amounts of digital data calls for better and more widespread use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities for law enforcement agencies (LEAs). AI can provide benefits to LEAs at all levels given the right understanding, tools, data and protection while increased awareness of criminal misuse is providing an immediate and concerning threat that must be tackled rapidly. Furthermore, a community that brings together LEAs, researchers, industry, security practitioners and other actors in the security ecosystem under a coordinated and strategic effort is essential for the realisation of these efforts into operational practices. STARLIGHT presents an inclusive and sustainable vision for increasing the awareness, capability, adoption and long-term impact of AI in Europe for LEAs. Five strategic goals underpin STARLIGHT’s approach: (1) Improve the widespread UNDERSTANDing of AI across LEAs to reinforce their investigative and cybersecurity operations and the need to uphold legal, ethical and societal values; (2) Provide opportunities to LEAs to EXPLOIT AI tools and solutions in their operational work that are trustworthy, transparent and human-centric; (3) Ensure that LEAs can PROTECT their own AI systems through privacy- and security-by-design approaches, better cybersecurity tools and knowledge; (4) Raise LEAs’ expertise and capacity to COMBAT the misuse of AI-supported crime and terrorism; and (5) BOOST AI for LEAs in Europe through high-quality datasets, an interoperable and standardised framework for long term sustainability of solutions, and the creation of an AI hub for LEAs that supports a strong AI security industry and enhances the EU’s strategic autonomy in AI. STARLIGHT will ensure European LEAs lead the way in AI innovation, autonomy and resilience, addressing the challenges of now and the future, prioritising the safety and security of Europe for all.

The security sector is considerably evolving, by adapting the offer to the risk and threats and by permanently aggregating emerging innovations. The digital is disrupting this industry, by adding new capacities and new threats. The security sector is very fragmented. SecurIT aims to create a new global competitive security industrial (product & service) value chain by supporting a better integration of innovative security systems, with a cross-sectoral and European approach, to support the time to market optimization, the integration of privacy and security by design at all steps of maturity, with a cross-border collaboration between SMEs and other RDI actors. This vision is supported by a 4 step-approach: #1: : Analysis of the demand-side, mobilizing 40 integrators/end-users to identify their needs and 42 potential demonstrators including major actors as large industry, cities, critical infrastructures operators that will join SecurIT as user group, experiment hosting or supportive partners (26 support letters in annex - AIRBUS, THALES, ATOS, COESS, ECSO, cities, EEN etc.). #2&3: Involving supply sides (SMEs), aiming to get 300 EoI to participate in SecurIT and attracting +1000 SMEs to get part through outreach actions (15 letters of SMEs in annex). #4: Select and Support 63 innovation projects involving 126 SMEs with over 3,5M€ of FSTP through 2 Instruments of support from TRL5 to TRL9 (Prototyping and Demonstration/Pilot), and +700K€ in services provided by partners. Highquality experts will be involved in the SMEs selection process. The consortium is as a whole, with 7 Security and complementary Clusters from France, Belgium, Lithuania, The Netherlands and Denmark, coming from most relevant security / cybersecurity Regional Innovation Hubs in Europe, and the SecurIT partners have experience in open call management at national and european level.