CONCORDIA’s Sector-specific Pilots – the basics

The collaboration between the academic and industrial community, where the research provides solutions for the identified industrial use cases, is organized in CONCORDIA’s work package by developing the so-called pilots. CONCORDIA is addressing industrial challenges in seven pilots – five sector-specific and two cross-sector pilots.

In CONCORDIA, we focus on the five sector-specific pilots, which are:

• Building a Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) for the telecom sector,
• A Threat Intelligence Platform for the finance sector,
• Addressing security aspects of e-mobility,
• Privacy and security in the e-health sector and
• Security of unmanned aerial systems

The goal of Industrial Domains and Sector-Specific Pilots is to strengthen the collaboration between industry and academic research through sector-specific pilots. Further, it is essential to understand each sector’s cybersecurity characteristics and specify use cases defined by the industry. Another goal is to address the defined use cases with solutions and demonstrators and to validate the results according to the requirements analysis also on real data. Finally, we aim at defining exploitations and initializing sector-specific incubators.

A sector-specific pilot is thus a challenge arising from an application domain and may comprise several “use cases”. It is essential to stress that we do not think and work in silos, but the pilots are rather well interconnected and work closely with other tasks. The development of CONCORDIA’s TIPs is an example of the tight collaboration between different tasks.

Enabling players from different sectors to share a wide variety of threat indicators, resp. Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) in a trusted way is a challenge. An efficient TIP is not trivial and relies on a tedious process consisting of demanding tasks like collection, processing, analysis, sharing, feedback, and especially building trust. Moreover, sharing not only data (simply sets of values) but also information or even intelligence (making assumptions and hypotheses after analysing available information and reaching plausible conclusions knowing that we never have all the data), with having privacy and anonymity in mind, requires a tight collaboration.

Despite the current situation, work on sector-specific pilots is progressing well. Two sector-specific pilots establish a customized threat intelligence platform for their application domain, namely the telecom and financial sector. Another task focuses on e-Mobility, especially coping with the security of e-charging infrastructures and security of the logistics and supply chain processes. Finally, an e-health pilot focuses on privacy and data protection in the health sector, while the last task showcases the security of vehicular communication systems. Each of the pilots succeeded in presenting a prototypical demonstrator or establishing a well-working collaboration with the research community.