Against the background of the regulation 2014/910/EU on electronic identification (eID) and trusted services for electronic transactions in the internal market (eIDAS), the FutureTrust project aims at supporting the practical implementation of the regulation in Europe and beyond. For this purpose the FutureTrust project will address the need for globally interoperable solutions through 1) basic research with respect to the foundations of trust and trustworthiness, with the aim of developing new, widely compatible trust models or improving existing models, 2) actively driving the standardisation process, and 3) providing Open Source software components and trustworthy services as a functional base for fast adoption of standards and solutions. FutureTrust will demonstrate positive business cases for the reliance on electronic signatures, sealing services, and long-term authenticity of data and documents, all with a focus on accountability, transparency and usability. For a subset of use cases, carefully selected for relevance and visibility, the FutureTrust consortium will devise real world pilot applications for the public and private sector with a focus on legally significant global electronic transactions in between EU member states and with non-EU countries. The FutureTrust project will in particular develop a comprehensive Open Source validation service as well as a scalable preservation service for electronic signatures and will provide components for the eID-based application for qualified certificates across borders, and for the trustworthy creation of remote signatures and seals in a mobile environment. Furthermore, the FutureTrust project will extend and generalize existing trust management concepts to build a “Global Trust List”, which allows to maintain trust anchors and metadata for trust services and eID related services around the globe.

Europe needs to step up its efforts and strengthen its very own security capacities to secure its digital society, economy, and democracy. It is time to reconquer Europe’s digital sovereignty. The vision for Europe can only be to join forces across Europe’s research, industry and public sector and to include all talents not just those that have representation in the EU mainstream or are within big organizations. Diversity and inclusion are keys for success. Europe has incredible coverage and talent in the area of IT and cybersecurity. The area of cybersecurity is geographically fragmented across Europe for competences, and often also technically fragmented with problem-specific development of security solutions. There is no doubt that excellent research exists in Europe. Nevertheless, it is a fact that this research does not result in IT products and solutions that contribute to the European Single Digital Market. On contrary, a lot of research, also financed by EU ERC grants, is tested on real data in large US companies that cooperate with them. Europe has to and is already rethinking this strategy. CONCORDIA addresses the current fragmentation of security competence by networking diverse competences into a leadership role via a synergistic agglomeration of a pan-European Cybersecurity Center. The vision of CONCORDIA is to build a community a strong cooperation between all stakeholders, understanding that all stakeholders have their KPIs, bridging among them, and fostering the development of IT products and solutions along the whole supply chain. Technologically, it projects a broad and evolvable data-driven and cognitive E2E Security approach for the ever-complex ever-interconnected compositions of emergent data-driven cloud, IoT and edge-assisted ICT ecosystems.