Strategic programs for advanced research and technology in Europe

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SPARTA (Strategic programs for advanced research and technology in Europe)

Okres sprawozdawczy: 2020-08-01 do 2022-06-30

The SPARTA project is one of the laureates of the SU-ICT-03-2018 call, tasked with helping the EU scale up its investments in cybersecurity, with the specific goal of developing innovative technologies and skills to support the European industry, and contribute to the objective of European strategic autonomy. In doing so, these networks would support through first-hand experiences the legislative and political processes that frame discussion around the EU Proposed Regulation 2018/0328.
SPARTA chose to directly and reflexively experiment with governance choices, implementing them across its internal scientific, technical, and support actions. The SPARTA proposal stated an ambitious demonstration objective:
The project’s consortium is committed to demonstrate that a research governance based on expertise, coopetition, and diversity can out-innovate Europe’s competition.
To this aim, SPARTA aims to demonstrate the setup and assessment of the European Cybersecurity Competence Network. SPARTA is equipped with three powerful instruments: a diligent roadmap committee, mission-oriented research programs, and a partnership instrument. It is further supported by key enablers: a governance based on leadership and diversity, as well as transversal activities spanning training and awareness, sustainable exploitation, certification and dissemination and communication.
SPARTA is developing an ambitious research and innovation roadmap to leverage Europe’s strengths and opportunities, across multiple disciplines, maturity levels, and geographical locations.
In collaboration with the Roadmap, SPARTA launches four Programs that will validate the operation of the network and to perform ground-breaking advances in key areas for Europe’s strategic autonomy (T-SHARK in supervision, CAPE in evaluation, HAII-T in digital infrastructures, and SAFAIR in AI)
SPARTA is supported by an Associates and Friends Council aiming to establish unparalleled traction with European, national, and regional ecosystems, relaying concrete requirements, disruptive ideas, and novel results. SPARTA builds on this council and on new mechanisms to step up cybersecurity outreach, harmonize training curricula, and significantly strengthen European capacities.

SPARTA has been diligently working on many fronts during the full duration of its main activity, with the goal of organizing the network in itself and its governance. After a state of the art of governance models, SPARTA defined its governing principles with regards to R&D&I, community, and exploitation activities with the goal of structuring a future Cybersecurity Competence Network and European Cybersecurity Research and Competence Center. SPARTA proposed and implemented improvements to the CNN pilot it represents and prepared it to become sustainable, working in conjunction with the European Commission to help shaping the ECCC and NCC landscape. An internal and an external assessment of the project were performed as well as multiple ELSA audit of these choices.
A major objective of SPARTA is its European Cybersecurity Roadmap, of which four versions were already published. This SPARTA Roadmap regroups 14 topics for the future of European Cybersecurity gathered from more than 60 initial contributions. The SPARTA Roadmap is also made available online in a more interactive fashion with the addition of a questionnaire to gather feedbacks and challenges.
Building on this SPARTA Roadmap are found the four SPARTA Programs, centred around disruptive developments that are identified as key to European strategic autonomy. These programs published various reports such as a Cybersecurity threat intelligence common data model for T-SHARK, detailed specifications and an execution strategy for CAPE, a framework for intelligent infrastructures for HAII-T, and a threat analysis and a description of security mechanisms for AI in SAFAIR. In addition, the four SPARTA Programs addressed were fully executed to develop key solutions to answer the challenges identified, producing numerous report and demonstrators. T-SHARK pursued their work on a Threat prediction framework and legal framework while developing visual analytics for cybersecurity threat analysis. CAPE developed and validated 18 tools on 2 testbeds on the verticals of autonomous vehicles and e-Government services. HAII-T built a complete orchestration framework with security workflows and tested it on a real intelligent infrastructure. SAFAIR created security mechanisms and tools for AI systems, which were then validated through a public AI contest.
SPARTA Partnership Instrument established SPARTA Associates and Friends to create a cybersecurity network while gathering inputs for the SPARTA Roadmap. Leveraging on this network, the JCCI was created to pool the various cybersecurity tools together on a common platform. SPARTA organised multiple SPARTA Brokerage Event to bolster H2020 cybersecurity project creation and to support new actors in joining such projects. SPARTA supported various H2020 proposal with tailor-made LoS, which will allow future collaboration between the projects and allow SPARTA to extend its Roadmap with their inputs. SPARTA liaised with and supported the European and national cybersecurity authorities in terms of cybersecurity evaluation facilities and establishing process-oriented certification concepts for software development and deployment.
Finally, on the dissemination and communication front, SPARTA spread awareness of cybersecurity through its official website and social media channels as well as through participation to numerous dissemination events. It started “Women in SPARTA” Campaign while supporting other such campaigns. In another campaign, “Go Cyber with SPARTA”, SPARTA established contacts and performed cybersecurity audits and training with four different institutions in Europe outermost regions.
In parallel of its execution, SPARTA cooperated with the three other pilots for the Cybersecurity Competence Networks in the various federated workstream that were created.

Paving the way for a future responsible governance, SPARTA partners started to determine the ethical, legal and societal aspects relevant in the wider context of cybersecurity in order to produce general guidelines for responsible cybersecurity research and innovation.
SPARTA achieved remarkable advances on two fronts: training, and dissemination. W.r.t. training, SPARTA developed the SPARTA Cybersecurity Skills Framework (CSF), the first European CSF, to find a common language for course content description across different institutions in Europe. SPARTA efforts have been impactful throughout the community and up to the European Cybersecurity Skills Framework (ECSF) work carried out by an ENISA working group – to which SPARTA was an observer. A manual to provide recommendations on how ECSF can be used to shape education programmes linked with cybersecurity was also produced. A design methodology was created for curricula for higher education and professional training in cybersecurity. This same methodology was then tested in some voluntary university and professional training facilities to create a cyber training and exercise framework. Those documents are reinforced by two interactive tools, an Education map of more than 100 higher education cybersecurity programs and a curricula designer tool to design study programs with respect to the ECSF.

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Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SPARTA (Strategic programs for advanced research and technology in Europe)

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