With the increasing use of I.T. by military units and command structures, cyber-threats and possible issues affecting the defence resources of the EU Member-States are becoming a reality that ought to be addressed, since a cyber-attack can compromise the security and integrity of countries, and even lead to the loss of human lives.
INESC TEC’s Centre for Advanced Computer Systems (CRACS) participates in the European project PANDORA (Cyber Defence Platform For Real-Time Threat Hunting, Incident Response and Information Sharing), which aims to improve the EU’s cyber-defence capability, through the development of an open tool, available to all Members.
“This solution resorts to artificial intelligence and automatic processing techniques to detect cyber-attacks in real time. While signalling the attack, it seeks to find out more about the origin, in order to characterise the attack and share it with other countries, so that they can be safe”, explained António Pinto, researcher at CRACS, and lecturer at the School of Management and Technology (ESTG) of the Polytechnic of Porto.
The fact that PANDORA is an open and integrated system will improve the detection and reaction resources, thus promoting the sharing of information concerning cyber-threats in the field of defence, while complementing the traditional security solutions that already exist in each country. “We believe that this project will contribute to the development of the EU’s cyber- resilience capabilities”, added António Pinto, who is part of the Portuguese team participating in the project.
Two testing scenarios
The PANDORA system will be tested in two different scenarios: military naval security and military sensor network security. In the first case, the tool will be installed on a warship, since they are quite vulnerable to cyber-attacks – mainly due to the use of many I.T. systems. Moreover, the combat systems will also be tested. In the second case, the solution will be tested with wireless communication sensors included in weapons, ammunition, vehicles, robots, among others, which share sensitive information about the location of military infrastructures and equipment.
The project includes 15 partners, from 7 countries. In Portugal, INESC TEC works together with the Research, Development and Innovation Centre of the Military Academy (CINAMIL) and GMV. The consortium also includes: Thales Hellas SA (the project-leader, from Greece), Infili Technologies PC (Greece), Orion Innovations PC, UBITECH – Ubiquitous Solutions (Greece), HM EI Zrt. (Hungary), Cyber Services Zrt. (Hungary), Center Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (Spain), Austrian Institute of Technology (Austria), GATE WATCHER (France), Naval Group (France) and NVISO (Belgium).
The European Commission awarded €7M to the project, within the scope of the EDIDP (European Industrial Development Programme).
The INESC TEC researcher mentioned in this news piece is associated with ESTG-P.Porto.
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