European Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Conference

Nowadays, cyber-physical systems are ubiquitously present in our everyday life. Their usage spans many applications, like industrial control systems, modern buildings, homes, transportation, and critical infrastructures. Novel paradigms and technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Software Defined Network (SDN), Cloud and Edge Computing, made all of these devices and environments become "intelligent", interconnected, dynamic, and flexible, thus also sometimes known simply as "smart". The increasing use of these smart devices and environments is bringing a novel technological revolution, that generates new business opportunities across industry sectors from healthcare to transport and from agriculture to manufacturing and new functionality for consumers. However, these opportunities come with their own new threats. Determining the potential vulnerabilities that new malwares may exploit in these smart systems and providing an adequate amount of protection is more challenging than in traditional computer systems for a variety of reasons that include low computational power, inadequate software quality, and also more importantly the fact that such environments combine human, physical and digital (cyber) aspects to the system design and implementation.

Fulvio Valenza is an assistant professor with time contract at Politecnico di Torino. His main research interests are in the areas of cybersecurity and network management, with a special focus on the analysis, verification, and refinement of Security and Access Control Policies. He has also been working on modeling and automatically configuring Network Security Functions (NSF), security orchestration in virtualized networks, and modeling, analysis, and mitigation of threats in smart and distributed systems. He served also as workshop co-chair of the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th edition of SecSoft, as Guest Editor for Elsevier Computer Network and IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management, as a TPC member in several international conferences and workshops on computer and network security (e.g., Netsoft, NOMS, Mobisec, SN, Globecom), and as also reviewer for several international journals on network and computer security. He has been also involved in different EU projects: FP7 SECURED, H2020 SHIELD, H2020 Rainbow, H2020 ASTRID, of which he serves as leader on the Security Orchestration working package.

The corona pandemic is the first major pandemic in times of big data, AI and smart devices. Some nations have deployed these technologies a large scale to support a trace/quarantine/test/isolate strategy in order to contain a pandemic. However, concerns have been raised w.r.t. some solutions that are not compatible with the privacy regimes in some jurisdictions including the European Union. Fortunately, a range of cryptographic techniques allows performing proximity and presence tracing based on data minimization. This talk will compare several protocols including the solutions developed by the DP-3T (Distributed Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing) consortium. Apps based on this protocol have been rolled out in more than 40 countries and states, with support of Google and Apple; in the EU, these apps have been interconnected to work as a single virtual app using the European Federated Gateway Service, which has linked 17 EU countries and reached approximately 100 million users. The talk will discuss the lessons learned from this large-scale deployment in which the principles of privacy-by-design and data minimization have played a central role.

Bart Preneel received the Electr. Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from the KU Leuven (Belgium). He is a Full Professor at the KU Leuven where he heads the COSIC research group. He was visiting professor at five universities in Europe. He has authored more than 400 scientific publications and is inventor of 4 patents. Bart Preneel has participated to more than 50 EU funded projects and has coordinated ten of those including the EU NoE ECRYPT. He has served as panel member and chair for the European Research Council. Since 1997 he is serving on the Board of Directors of the IACR (International Association for Cryptologic Research), from 2002-2007 as vice president and from 2008-2013 as president. He is a member of the Permanent Stakeholders group of ENISA and of the Academia Europaea. He received the European Information Security Award in the area of academic research (2003), an honorary Certified Information Security Manager(CISM) designation by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association (ISACA) (2003), the RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics (2014), the IFIP TC11 Kristian Beckman award (2015) and the ESORICS Outstanding Research Award (2017). In 2015 he was elected as fellow of the IACR and in 2021 he received the IT Person of the Year award from Computable. He frequently consults for industry and government about security and privacy technologies. He was involved in the design of the Belgian eID Card and the Belgian evoting scheme and he is technical lead of the development of the Belgian Coronalert app. He is co-founder and Board Member of the start-up nextAuth, Board member of Approach and member of the Advisory Board of Tioga Capital Partners and Nym Technologies.