INTERSECT

INTERSECT is a public private partnership funded by the Dutch National Research Council (Grant NWA.1160.18.301, awarded with 8.2 million euros) and more than 20 organisations in the context of their commitment to the Dutch National Science Agenda. It focuses on R&D and (technological) innovation for a novel approach to the cyber security of Internet-of-things.

The rhythms and operations of modern society are regulated by IoT devices. On the street, at the office, in the car or in the train, at the airport or at home. IoT systems monitor our buildings, regulate traffic, listen to our conversations, deliver energy to our homes, and automate and operate our factories. Their applications and numbers increase by the hour, and we are quickly heading to a trillion devices deployed worldwide – approximately 150 devices per person on the planet.

Increasingly often, these devices are turned against us: spying on us, launching massive, distributed cyber-attacks, used as bridges to infect networks, employed in sophisticated nation-state attacks targeting our facilities We are losing control of our own infrastructure and soon we will be unable to manage the IoT we created. The sheer number of devices, their heterogeneity, and their varying longevity (days, or decades) represents a huge challenge impacting our personal safety, the security of our data, and our economy.

We are on the verge of losing the capacity of managing IoT: “Classic” constructs we used relatively successfully to manage IT systems, such as trust separation and graceful degradation, are now failing us, as they do not accommodate for the very characteristics and nature of IoT devices. There are several dimensions separating IoT from regular IT. In this context, the “old” IT-based security paradigm, based on ad-hoc solutions developed and deployed specifically for each system, is doomed to fail. In fact, it is already failing, as humans lose sight of the huge complexities characterizing such a heterogeneous, vast environment.

Such a multifaceted problem, needs to be tackled from different yet interrelated perspectives. To structure our approach, we align with the most recent edition of the National Cyber Security Research Agenda and we tackle the problem ‘integrally’ from various different, and complementary, perspectives: “Design”, “Defence”, “Attack”, “Governance”, and “Privacy”.

re-thinking the security paradigm, delegating part of the security management to the system that needs to autonomously adapt to the changing environment, while remaining under our supervision, and re-think accordingly all our security technologies.

In order to address the problem on as broad a front as possible, the project team has prepared a number of so-called "Work Packages":

Package 1: Governance and Management
Package 2: Design
Package 3: Defence
Package 4: Attacks
Package 5 and 6: Governance of Privacy and Security
Package 7: Federated Laboratory
Package 8: Knowledge Utilisation & Entrepreneurship

Within the Work Package 7 of INTERSECT, the consortium recently achieved one of the first tangible outputs of the project, namely, the Federated Lab (FedLab): https://intersct.nl/intersects-federated-laboratory-is-now-online/