Completed R&D Projects

Overview: Handling, processing and delivering data from millions of devices around the world is a complex and remarkable feat that hinges on edge computing systems. While edge computing brings computation and data storage closer, fog computing is what brings analytic services to the edge of the network. It’s an alternative to cloud computing. The EU-funded MARVEL project will develop an Edge-to-Fog-to-Cloud ubiquitous computing framework to enable multimodal perception and intelligence for audio-visual scene recognition, event detection, and situational awareness in a Smart City Environment. It will collect, analyse and data-mine multimodal audio-visual streaming data to improve the quality of life and services to citizens within the smart city paradigm, without violating ethical and privacy limits, in an AI-responsible manner.

Overview: SMART BEAR will develop an innovative platform with off-the-shelf smart and medical devices, at TRL9, to support the healthy and independent living of elderly people with five prevalent health-related conditions; Hearing Loss, Cardio Vascular Diseases, Cognitive Impairments, Mental Health Issues, and Balance Disorders, as well as Frailty. This will be achieved through intelligent, evidenced-based interventions on lifestyle, medically-significant risk factors, and chronic disease management, enabled by the utilisation of continuous and objective medical and environment sensing, assistive technologies, and big data analytics. The platform will be validated through five large-scale pilots, involving five countries and 5.000 individuals.

JCOP will be deployed and validated through the creation of a Southeast Europe Coordinated Response Cluster including the national security authorities of Greece and Cyprus. This will demonstrate the capacity- and coordination-building impact of JCOP at the national and the EU level (CSIRT Network). In addition, the Norwegian National Security Authority – NSM will contribute to the validation of JCOP’s applicability. JCOP will be aligned with pertinent EU platforms and initiatives, such as the MeliCERTes platform, the Empowering EU ISACs project for information sharing between operators of essential services (OES), and the four pilots of the EU Cybersecurity Competence Network.

Overview: Over 25 million European SMEs/MEs, central within EU enterprise policy, face multiple challenges related to personal data protection; ranging from awareness to a clear and practical roadmap to compliance, the most prominent one is the fact that, unlike larger enterprises, SMEs/MEs lack access to enterprise-grade cybersecurity technology and capacity-building for compliance, making them increasingly often victims of costly data breaches. Although according to studies, small and micro businesses declare openness to invest in regulatory compliance, including for consultants and technology, millions of European SMEs/MEs still fail to comply with GDPR while their managers are confused about basic data security concepts, like data stewardship, encryption, and secure communication. This presents a clear gap between cybersecurity- and privacy-related spending and its actual effect on personal data protection compliance.
SENTINEL aspires to bridge this gap by boosting SMEs/MEs capabilities in this domain through innovation, at a cost-effective level. SENTINEL will integrate tried-and-tested modular cybersecurity technologies with fresh, ambitious ones, such as a novel Identity Management System for human-centric data portability, enabling a unified “European Data Space” and an end-to-end digital personal data protection compliance self-assessment framework for SMEs, into a unified digital architecture. The data from these modules will then undergo disruptive Intelligence for Compliance through SENTINEL’s digital core, featuring machine learning-powered recommendations, policy drafting & enforcement for compliance, and a ‘one-stop-shop incident response center. Combined with a well-researched methodology for application, an open knowledge-sharing hub, and a wide-reaching plan for experimentation, SENTINEL will catalyze the adoption of market-leading security tech among SMEs/MEs and help safeguard their and their customers’ assets.

Overview: Artificial intelligence and robotics are key to the transformation of the healthcare industry. For example, they can lead to improved quality of patient care while reducing healthcare expenditures. At the same time, however, advancements in these areas open the door to new types of cyberthreats, making many organisations reluctant to adopt them in the workplace. The EU-funded RESPECT project aims to design and develop defence strategies for the secure, safe and privacy-preserving operation of indoor mobile robotics solutions for logistics applications in healthcare. Central to the envisioned activities is the creation of a European, intersectoral network of organisations involved in a collaborative research programme, jointly working towards the achievement of the objectives described above.

Overview: Energy efficiency in industry has increased in the EU over the past 20 years. While there have been improvements in all industrial branches, numerous in-factory changes can help further increase energy sustainability. The aim of the EU-funded EnerMan project is to reduce the energy consumption of the various components of manufacturing systems, such as machine tools. Specifically, it will create an energy sustainability management framework to collect data from the factory to predict energy trends using industrial processes, equipment and energy cost models. EnerMan will deliver an autonomous, intelligent decision-support engine that will evaluate the predicted trends and assess if they match predefined energy consumption sustainability objectives.

Overview: AI4HEALTHSEC proposes a state of the art solution that improves the detection and analysis of cyber-attacks and threats on HCIIs, and increases the knowledge on the current cyber security and privacy risks. Additionally, AI4HEALTHSEC builds risk awareness, within the digital Healthcare ecosystem and among the involved Health operators, to enhance their insight into their Healthcare ICT infrastructures and provides them with capability to react in case of security and privacy breaches. Last but not least AI4HEALTHSEC fosters the exchange of reliable and trusted incident-related information, among ICT systems and entities composing the HCIIs without revealing sensitive corporate details.

Overview: Managing supply chain (SC) activities today is increasingly complex. One reason is the lack of an integrated means for security officers and operators to protect their interconnected critical infrastructures and cyber systems in the new digital era. The EU-funded CYRENE project aims to enhance the security, privacy, resilience, accountability and trustworthiness of supply chains, through the provision of a novel and dynamic Conformity Assessment Process (CAP) that evaluates the security and resilience of SC services. The CAP also assesses the interconnected IT infrastructures composing these services, and the individual devices that support the operations of the SCs. A new collaborative, multilevel, evidence-driven risk-and-privacy assessment approach will be validated in the scope of realistic scenarios/conditions comprising real-life SC infrastructures and end-users.

Overview: IntellIoT is Pan-European Research project supported by the European Commission with €8 million EU funding. It fosters the development of humanized IoT and AI devices and systems. The initiative aims to facilitate a competitive ecosystem and to strengthen the European market in finding deeptech solutions applicable in healthcare, agriculture and manufacturing. Enabling technologies such as 5G, cybersecurity, distributed technology, Augmented Reality and tactile internet, the project champions end-user trust, adequate security and privacy by design. In the upcoming 3 years, IntellIoT will also support SMEs and startups in Europe with funding and access to technology per pilot projects executed in collaboration with the IntellIoT consortia partners.

Overview: FISHY aims at designing, developing, validating and demonstrating a coordinated framework for cyber resilience provisioning to guarantee a trusted supply chain of ICT systems, built upon distributed, dynamic, and often fundamentally insecure and heterogeneous ICT infrastructures. The platform is envisioned not only to facilitating adaptive system reconfigurations, but also reacting to and defying the effects of cyber attacks in real time of the ICT supply chain end-to-end, and in particular in the IoT domain. The FISHY proposes a comprehensive validation and demonstration strategy built upon three use cases from different sectors, including agriculture, manufacturing and transportation. The expected project outcome is a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) of the FISHY platform, along with the dissemination and ambitious exploitation strategies.

Overview: HEIR is to provide thorough threat identification and cybersecurity knowledge base system addressing both local (in the hospital / medical centre) and global (including different stakeholders) levels, that comprises the following pillars: (i) Real time threat hunting services, facilitated by advanced machine learning technologies, supporting the identification of the most common threats in electronic medical systems based on widely accepted methodologies such as the OWASP Top 10 Security Risks and the ENISA Top 15 Threats; (ii) Sensitive data trustworthiness sharing facilitated by the HEIR privacy aware framework; (iii) Innovative Benchmarking based on the calculation of the Risk Assessment of Medical Applications (RAMA) score, that will measure the security status of every medical device and provide thorough vulnerability assessment of hospitals and medical centres; (iv) The delivery of an Observatory for the Security of Electronic Medical Devices; an intelligent knowledge base accessible by different stakeholders, providing advanced visualisations for each threat identified in RAMA and facilitating global awareness on EMD-related threats.

Overview: The main objective of ASCAPE is to take advantage of the recent ICT advances in Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to support cancer patients’ quality of life and health status. To achieve its objective, ASCAPE will create an open AI infrastructure that will enable health stakeholders (hospitals, research institutions, companies, etc.) to deploy and execute its AI algorithms locally on their private data. Any new knowledge produced by this process will be sent back to the open AI infrastructure. This way the knowledge will be shared among everyone while the medical data will still remain private. The services to be designed, piloted and deployed inside this project will include intelligent interventions for physiological and psychological support, improved patient and family counselling and guidance, early diagnosis and forecasts of ill-health, identification of disease trajectories and relapse, and improved health literacy.

Overview: The manufacturing ecosystem lacks a thorough cyber intelligence solution that addresses the key IIoT-related cybersecurity challenges towards a full realization of collaborative manufacturing in the context of Industry 4.0. COLLABS focuses on developing, validating, and demonstrating a comprehensive cyber-intelligence framework for collaborative manufacturing. This framework will enable secure data exchange across the digital supply chain while providing a high degree of resilience, reliability, accountability, and trustworthiness by addressing threat prevention, detection, mitigation, and real-time response. COLLABS is aimed at making significant scientific and technological advances in secure multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption, distributed deep learning and anomaly detection, distributed ledger technologies (blockchain) and smart contracts, and distributed remote software attestation.

Overview: UNITI’s overall aim is to deliver a predictive computational model based on existing and longitudinal data attempting to address the question which treatment approach is optimal for a Tinnitus patient based on specific parameters. Clinical, epidemiological, medical, genetic and audiological data, including signals reflecting ear-brain communication, will be analysed from existing databases. Predictive factors for different patient groups will be extracted and their prognostic relevance will be tested in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in which different groups of patients will undergo a combination of therapies targeting the auditory and central nervous systems. Sphynx’s role in the project will be to support the integration of heterogeneous databases in a federated (big) data repository and the provision of security assurance for the system to be developed to provide data analytics in the project.

Overview: CyberSANE is aimed at developing a novel framework to improve the detection and analysis of cyber-attacks and threats on critical infrastructures and to increase the knowledge on the current cyber threat landscape. The framework will support human operators (such as Incident Response professionals) to dynamically increase preparedness, improve cooperation amongst CIIs operators, and adopt appropriate steps to manage security risks, report and handle security incidents.

Overview: Bio-Phoenix aims to develop a bio-inspired paradigm for reconstructing nearly extinct complex software systems based on a novel computational DNA (co-DNA) oriented systems modelling approach. The co-DNA will encapsulate logic and program code and will enable the use of analogues of biological processes for transmitting, transforming, combining, activating and deactivating it across computational and communication devices. The purpose of encoding the co-DNA of a system, and computational analogues of biological processes using it, is to enable other computational devices receiving the co-DNA to act as parts of the system that needs to be reconstructed, realise its functionality, and spread further the system reconstruction process.

Overview: SPIDER delivers an innovative Cyber Range as a Service platform that extends and combines the capabilities of existing telecommunication testbeds and cyber ranges into a unified facility for (i) testing new security technologies, (ii) training modern cyber defenders in near real-world conditions, and (iii) supporting organizations and relevant stakeholders in making optimal cybersecurity investment decisions. At its core, it is a highly customizable dynamic network modeling instrument that enables real-life virtualization and real-time emulation of networks and systems. This will be complemented by cyber econometric capabilities, enabling users to forecast the evolution of attacks and their associated economic impact through the application of innovative risk analysis methodologies, econometric models, and real-time attack emulation.

Overview: C4IIoT is aimed at building and demonstrating a novel and unified IIoT cybersecurity framework for malicious and anomalous behaviour anticipation, detection, mitigation, and end-user informing. The framework provides a holistic and disruptive security-enabling solution for minimizing attack surfaces in IIoT systems, by exploiting (i) emerging security software and hardware protection mechanisms; (ii) state of the art machine and deep learning and privacy-aware analytics; (iii) novel encrypted network flow analysis; (iv) secure-by-design IIoT device fabrication; and (v) blockchain technologies, to provide a viable scheme for enabling security and accountability, preserving privacy, enabling reliability and assuring trustworthiness within IIoT applications. The C4IIoT framework will be demonstrated and validated on two carefully selected use cases in real world environments, namely Enabling security IIoT in (i) Inbound Logistics and (ii) a Smart Factory.

Overview: The overall goal of RESIST is to increase the resilience of seamless transport operation to natural and man-made extreme events, protect the users of the European transport infrastructure and provide optimal information to the operators and users of the infrastructure. The project will address extreme events on critical structures, implemented in the case of bridges and tunnels attacked by all types of extreme physical, natural and man-made incidents, and cyber-attacks. Sphynx’s contributions will in developing support for the security and resilience of critical infrastructures management systems against cyber-attacks.

Overview: THREAT-ARREST aims to develop an advanced training platform incorporating emulation, simulation, serious gaming, and visualization capabilities to adequately prepare stakeholders with different types of responsibility and levels of expertise in defending high-risk cyber systems and organizations to counter advanced, known, and new cyber-attacks.

Overview: SEMIoTICS aims to develop a pattern-driven framework, built upon existing IoT platforms, to enable and guarantee secure and dependable actuation and semi-autonomic behaviour in IoT applications. Patterns encode proven dependencies between security, privacy, dependability and interoperability (SPDI) properties of individual smart objects and corresponding properties of orchestrations involving them. The SEMIoTICS framework will support cross-layer intelligent dynamic adaptation, including heterogeneous smart objects, networks and clouds, addressing effective adaptation and autonomic behaviour at field (edge) and infrastructure (backend) layers based on intelligent analysis and learning.

Overview: The overall objective of HOLOBALANCE is to develop and validate a new personalized hologram coach platform for virtual coaching, motivation, and empowerment of the ageing population with balance disorders. The coaching part will be realised by holograms and augmented reality games, along with easy-to-use sensors (smart bracelets, smart glasses, sensorized soles) that can be customized to implement and coach the user with specific, individualized exercises, offering new forms of accessible user interaction. Sphynx Technology Solutions is responsible for the security and privacy of the platform.