UT secures 2.3 million for cybersecurity research

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has granted 2.3 million euros to five cybersecurity projects led by University of Twente (UT). This is part of the third NWO Cybersecurity call, which provides funding for ten projects in total. The projects have to be multidisciplinary and need at least 30 percent company contributions. Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) were both awarded twice, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (RU) once.

The Isolate project, led by Johann Hurink, aims to develop an extra layer of security for the complex distribution network controlling renewable energy. Smoke, headed by Pepijn Pinkse, investigates the possibility of using physical unclonable keys (PUKs) to secure sensitive communication networks. Under the guidance of Aiko Pras, Upin is to result in a system that gives Internet users control over the path their traffic follows. Anna Sperotto’s Mascot project studies the resilience of the cloud to support security-conscious cloud strategies. Share, run by Andreas Peter, is looking to develop advanced encryption techniques to protect medical data.

The selected projects from TU Delft are Distant, headed by Stjepan Picek, on the application of machine learning techniques to defend against implementation attacks, and Rapid, led by Carlos Hernandez Ganan, on remediation of compromised IoT devices. TUE was awarded for Luca Allodi’s Serenity project, on evidence-based security response centers, and Boris Škorić’s Forwardt project, on forensic watermarking with robust dynamic tracing. Under the guidance of RU’s Bart Jacobs, E4A is diving into encryption for all.