Objective ICT-2007.8.6 FET proactive 6: ICT forever yours

Target Outcome

The mass diffusion of digital systems and their pervasiveness in our everyday lives increases our expectations on the dependability, security and longevity of these systems. This requires new built-in mechanisms for enhancing confidence in their usage, for protecting them from malicious intents and for preserving them from the threat of ageing, in the context of highly decentralised and incremental development and deployment practices. Projects should focus on one or several of the following:

• Eternal systems - to develop a theoretical and practical framework for extremely long-lived systems, requiring minimal intervention and management to thrive in spite of changes in usage, host device, network context or data- and data protection formats.
• Knowledge, diversity and time - new approaches for eternal and reliable access to knowledge assets, in which knowledge parts are produced locally, but exploited globally, and are endowed with a  sense of time and context to make them robust against ageing, diversity of use and evolving semantics.
• Secure and dependable software -  methods and tools for high-level verifiably secure and dependable programming, and new metrics to aid assessability of the security and dependability of highly distributed and heterogeneous software or of ambient systems.

Expected Impact

The research should contribute to systems that are more versatile in their interaction with modules, systems and services in their environment: adapting to change in the environment, harnessing dispersed and dynamic content, preserving and changing original functionality and properties over time, providing security to their environment and offering assessable security of systems in the context of their environment.

Funding Scheme and Indicative Budget

• CP (IP only) 19m euros
• CSA (CA only) 1m euros