Scalable and Quantum Resilient Heterogeneous Edge Computing enabling Trustworthy AI

Project Information

SMARTY

Grant agreement ID: 101140087

DOI

10.3030/101140087

EC signature date 28 June 2024

Start date 1 June 2024

End date 31 May 2027

Funded under

• Digital, Industry and Space

Total cost

€ 31 999 656,45

EU contribution

€ 9 692 779,02

Coordinated by

CONSORZIO NAZIONALE INTERUNIVERSITARIO PER LE TELECOMUNICAZIONI (CNIT)
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SMARTY (Scalable and Quantum Resilient Heterogeneous Edge Computing enabling Trustworthy AI)

Reporting period: 2024-06-01 to 2025-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

SMARTY has a primary objective of enabling secure and trustworthy dynamic integration of decentralized intelligence within the cloud-edge continuum, while ensuring reliability, privacy, and scalability at runtime. To achieve these objectives, SMARTY emphasizes the need for secure and auditable interactions between the involved devices, making sure that all system interactions are trustworthy and transparent. SMARTY also incorporates innovative secure communication paradigms and encryption algorithms to guarantee secure data transmission and
storage. Furthermore, SMARTY makes use of AI algorithms aimed at providing an auditable and explainable system, promoting transparency and accountability. The seamless and online discoverability and composability of autonomous edge intelligence within SMARTY is achieved through the use of a semantic-based interplay strategy that facilitates the interaction between the edge devices of such systems, enabling secure, trustworthy, and auditable usage of edge intelligence.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During the 1st year of the project, work performed was focused on preliminary implementations of hardware accelerators for the secure communications and preliminary implementations of different secure networking solutions.
In particular, work concerned designing a Quantum-Resistant Secure Element (QR-SE) and Quantum Resistant (QR) transceiver, to address emerging threats such as quantum computing, and highlights key achievements, including requirement analysis and the integration of post-quantum cryptographic algorithms like KYBER and DILITHIUM.
In addition, work carried was concerned the design and preliminary implementation of (i) security solutions for trustworthy edge computing and networking, (ii) software defined perimeters and orchestration through AI-techniques; (iii) metadata representation and smart allocation solutions, and (iv) monitoring and telemetry infrastructure. These solutions are of paramount importance for secure networking.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

SMARTY is on its 1st year and results are limited. Work is devoted, designing network security solutions and hardware accelerators.