Leading European cybersecurity research organizations and Intel Labs join forces to conduct research on Collaborative Autonomous & Resilient Systems

The new research institute operates in the fields of drones, self-driving vehicles, and collaborative systems in industrial automation.

Intel and leading European universities in the field of cybersecurity and privacy will open a new initiative for “Collaborative Autonomous & Resilient Systems” (CARS) to tackle security, privacy, and functional safety challenges of autonomous systems that may collaborate with each other – examples are drones, self-driving vehicles, or industrial automation systems.

The goal of the CARS lab is to kick off longer-term collaboration between leading research organizations to enhance resilience and trustworthiness of these cutting-edge technologies. Collaborating institutions include TU Darmstadt (Germany), Aalto University (Finland), Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany), TU Wien (Austria), and Luxembourg University (Luxembourg). The coordinator of the new CARS lab will be TU Darmstadt serving as the hub university, where several researchers of Intel Labs are located. The research teams will collaborate with Intel teams on campus to design, prototype, and publish novel and innovative resilient and secure autonomous collaborative systems and to build an ecosystem to further validate their ideas in real-world scenarios.

Successful collaboration continues

The CARS lab is a new Intel Collaborative Lab as a continuation of the extremely successful Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Secure Computing (ICRI-SC) that included TU Darmstadt and Aalto University and focused on mobile and IoT security between 2012 and 2017. Noteworthy achievements resulting from this collaboration include Off-the-Hook, a client-side anti-phishing technique and SafeKeeper which uses Intel Software Guard Extensions to protect user passwords in web services; as well as TrustLite, a lightweight security architecture for IoT devices.

In the renewed collaboration Intel and the – now five – partner universities focus on the study of security, privacy and functional safety of autonomous systems that collaborate with each other.

TU Darmstadt aims to build on the foundation of the promising results from the initial work in the Intel institute and will address more complex systems with advanced real-life collaboration and attack models and defenses.

“We have already had five years of very successful and fruitful experience with the collaborative research lab between TU Darmstadt and Intel. Since 2012 our researchers could closely work with an Intel team located at TU Darmstadt leading to highly impactful results in the area of embedded and IoT security. I am confident that the new and much larger CARS lab that integrates top researchers from five European universities is an excellent foundation for a creative, dynamic and highly innovative environment, and will strongly contribute to the new theme of security and safety for autonomous and intelligent systems”, adds Professor Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi from TU Darmstadt.

Aalto University plans to address autonomous systems security by focusing on security and privacy of machine learning and distributed consensus.

“Over the past four years, Intel has invested significantly to support research in our Secure Systems group. Regular interactions with Intel engineers and leaders allow us to gain valuable insights into real-world security and privacy challenges and steer our research accordingly. Being able to identify and work on real problems is hugely motivating for my students and me personally. I am delighted that Intel has decided to extend their collaboration with us in the renewed lab”, explains Professor N. Asokan from Aalto University.

Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) will advance the security of autonomous platforms and the self-defense capabilities of distributed systems by reconfigurable extensions to protect such systems from advanced attacks.

"We have worked on cyber security in CARS since 2003, and were one of the first groups internationally in this area. We are excited to collaborate with other leading academic institutions and Intel in the emerging area of security for autonomous systems. In particular, we hope that our expertise in hardware and system security will become a valuable part of the collaboration", says Professor Christof Paar from RUB.

Luxembourg University leverages intrusion tolerance and self-healing paradigms, to achieve automatic and long-lived resilience of CARS systems to both faults and hacker attacks.

“As a recently established research group in Luxembourg, we are proud Intel has entrusted our team CritiX at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) to face the resilience challenges of future collaborative autonomous system. I anxiously look forward to start working with my colleagues in CARS’ inspiring research environment, with a world leading hardware manufacturer on our side”, says Professor Paulo Esteves-Veríssimo from Luxembourg University.

TU Wien will contribute with its experience in designing fault-tolerant systems; specifically with non-conventional hardware architectures that are both energy efficient and robust against a large spectrum of faults and attacks.

“TU Wien is now joining the team, and we are thrilled about the opportunity to contribute to this unique research concept. Making systems safe and secure at the same time is definitely a great challenge, and having experts covering different perspectives of that challenge in the team is a first-class prerequisite for coming up with substantially new and sustainable solutions. At the same time the close collaboration with Intel will guide our focus to those aspects that are most relevant for large-scale industrial applications of the future. This is an ideal setting for influential research”, says Professor Andreas Steininger from TU Wien.

More information

Please visit the website of the new CARS lab at the ICRI-SC: www.icri-sc.org

Erasmus Mundus Program on Security and Cloud Computing (SECCLO)

Many of the current members of the Secure Systems Group and HAIC have their background in NordSecMob, the long-running Erasmus Mundus Master’s program that is coming to a close. This program has brought exceptional information-security students to Aalto and the partner universities. It has enabled our partner companies to recruit thesis students and graduates otherwise would be difficult to come by in such numbers. For us teachers and researchers, the diverse backgrounds and experiences of the international students have made a huge difference in the classroom and in research projects.

Therefore, I’m extremely happy to announce that the NordSecMob consortium will continue in the form of a new joint MSc program. We have received European Commission funding for an Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters Degree Program, called Security and Cloud Computing (SECCLO). With a total budget of almost 3M€, the new program will last until 2022, or three intakes of 20+ students each. In addition to being able to offer scholarships to excellent students, we will continue to be listed in the Erasmus Mundus catalogue, where many potential students start their search for MSc programs.

Each student in the new program will spend their first year at Aalto learning fundamental knowledge of information security as well as cloud and mobile computing. After a summer internship in industry, they will continue to one of our partner universities (DTU, EURECOM, KTH, NTNU, or Tartu), each offering their own specialization such as cloud or network security or cryptography. EURECOM in France is a new addition to the consortium. In the last six months of the two-year curriculum, the students will be doing their thesis in industry or with a university research group. Each student will get a Master’s degree from both Aalto and a partner university.

Aalto students might note that the Erasmus Mundus program has the same name, Security and Cloud Computing, as an existing majorin our MSc program. Indeed, the only difference is that Erasmus Mundus students leave for a partner university in the second year. The curricula were planned together (as an update of the NordSecMob program and the earlier Security and Mobile Computing major) and the first years are identical. We even plan to offer the same exchange opportunities in the partner universities to all information-security students. If you are a current MSc or BSc student at Aalto focusing on security, please contact Tuomas Aura or N. Asokan to learn more.

As a result of the SECCLO funding, we can expect more outstanding MSc students to Aalto every year for majoring in information security. An important factor in the program proposal was the support and involvement of the parter companies, Nokia Bell Labs, Cybernetica, F-Secure, Guardtime, Intel and VTT, as well as the HAIC initiative and industry funded scholarships that enable long-term sustainability of the program. We invite new companies with an interest in security education and our graduates to join HAIC to ensure the long-term success of the program. Naturally, all the SECCLO students will be part of HAIC. They will seek summer internships and thesis positions during their study program. In other words, SECCLO will greatly amplify our ability to meet the goals behind the setting up of HAIC.

HAIC

Today, the Heads of CS departments at Aalto University and University of Helsinki made a joint announcement establishing Helsinki-Aalto Center for Information Security HAIC. HAIC is intended to serve as a main focal point for research and education in the broad areas of information security & privacy at both universities. Initially HAIC will focus on selecting top incoming MSc students choosing to specialize in information security in our MSc programs.

This is an important and timely milestone. The NordSecMob joint degree program has been a resounding success during the past decade in training top-notch students from Finland and abroad at Aalto University. Many of them have gone on to work in Finnish industry. Some have continued with doctoral studies both a Aalto University and at other top universities in Europe. One of the reasons for NordSecMob's success is its scholarship program. But NordSecMob is coming to an end. At the same time, Finnish universities will introduce tuition fees for students from outside the EU/EEA area. This is what makes HAIC timely: both universities have allocated some scholarships for MSc students; this will help us attract and train similar levels of top quality students in information security.

Over time, we plan to extend HAIC in several ways. The first and most important among them is to reach out to our industrial partners in Finland and inviting them to sponsor more scholarships under the auspices of HAIC. The quality and international recognition of infosec research at Aalto University and University of Helsinki have significantly risen in the past few years. But the trend in government funding for higher education and research Finland is unmistakably downwards. Finnish industry stepping up its support is therefore crucial for ensuring our research and education continues to excel and expand. I am looking forward to dialogue with industry partners.