PROPHETS will look at redefining new methods to prevent, investigate and mitigate cybercriminal behaviours through the development of a coherent, EU-wide, adaptive SECURITY MODEL, built upon the interplay of the human factors within the new cyber ecosystem and capable of addressing the four fundamental dimensions at the core of the phenomenon: 1. early identification of security threats; 2. investigations within a new public-private governance; 3. Increased complexity of the response due to the expansion of the security perimeter towards new societal fields and the emergence of challenging jurisdictional problems; and, last but not least, 4. perception of security and freedoms among citizens, which requires a new communication strategy for LEAs and security policy makers.

METICOS aims to introduce Big Data Analysis of border control information systems, in order to provide a step-change towards more modern and efficient Smart Border management and towards gaining societal and political acceptance of modern control technologies of EU borders such as “no gate solutions”. It is therefore positioned as an initiative to create a real-time decision-support system with regard to different Smart Border control technologies that empowers two major stakeholder groups within the European border control sector (i.e., travellers and border control authorities & service providers) to ensure user acceptance, secure positive societal impact and maximize border control process efficiency. To this end, the METICOS project will develop a platform that integrates information systems and networks of data sources in order to validate the efficiency and users acceptance of border control technologies. The proposed platform will provide metrics and KPIs to authorities and decision makers, based on a number of independent variables: performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, physical privacy, accuracy, information privacy, ethical and societal perceptions. To maximize impact of the project, METICOS will join the European Initiative for Smart Borders and contribute aforementioned cross-border and cross-cultural Big Data Analysis and decision support systems that feature harvesting of multi-lingual and cross-sectorial data from heterogeneous sources, different analytics approaches and risk assessment methods. METICOS will be demonstrated and validated under real operating conditions. This will involve two pilot implementations executed at five different countries involving real travellers and staff. Furthermore, the METICOS ecosystem aims to work closely with border control research initiatives to demonstrate its operational performance improvements by means of combined validation with these solutions.

The internet has become an integral part of children and young people’s lives. The increased time spent online is prompting questions about whether they are in control of their internet usage. The low level of awareness of cyber threats and their potential impact is a serious issue that translates into the proliferation of incidents due to human mistakes. 51% of EU citizens feel not at all or not well informed about cyber threats and 86% of Europeans believe that the risk of becoming a victim of cybercrime is rapidly increasing. On the other hand, Law enforcement has noted that more and more teenagers and young people are increasingly committing cybercrimes. This is an international problem which has considerable cost implications; it is estimated that crimes in cyberspace will cost the global economy $445B annually. Understanding the behavioural and developmental aspects of cyber criminality is becoming increasingly important and underlies the necessity of a shift in focus from sanctions to deterrence and prevention. As a research project, RAYUELA aims to bring together law enforcement agencies (LEAs), sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, legal experts, computer scientists and engineers, to develop novel methodologies that allow better understanding the factors affecting online behaviour related to new ways of cyber criminality, as well as promoting the potential of these young talents for cybersecurity and technologies. RAYUELA’s main goal is to better understand the drivers and human factors affecting certain relevant ways of cybercriminality, as well as empower and educate young people (children and teenagers primarily) in the benefits, risks and threats intrinsically linked to the use of the Internet by playing, thus preventing and mitigating cybercriminal behaviour.

POLIIICE vision is to advance European LEAs to a novel lawful-interception (LI), investigation and intelligence era in which they will be able to effectively prevent, detect and investigate crime and terrorism amid the new age of communication (5G&Beyond, end-to-end encrypted communication and Quantum based encryption). These new age technologies turn legacy LI solutions to totally in-effective and therefore put significant risk on Europe’s fight against crime and terrorism. POLIIICE will offer, research, validate and demonstrate array of innovative LI measures at cloud & network level as well as at edge device level that together will enable LEAs to efficiently overcome the new age challenges and enable high throughput of its LI. In addition, POLIIICE will research and model QUDDaaS (Quantum unlock, detection and decryption as a service) as an envisaged central service, potentially outsourced at pan EU level, which will harness quantum computing for decryption of lawfully intercepted encrypted communication (which is vulnerable to Quantum’s Shor algorithm), for brute force detection of target-user’s credentials/tokens needed to access encrypted cloud-native apps and for Quantum unlock of lawfully seized edge devices. QUDDaaS may also detect and classify LI communications that are resistant to Quantum decryption power and therefore can’t be decrypted. POLIIICE also aims to improve the information exchange and cooperation among European LEAs by proposing and implementing a mechanism and procedure for exchanging pseudo-anonymized suspect identifiers. POLIIICE is designed for ensuring the cost-effectiveness, security and integrity of the new age LI and will provide the legal and ethical framework for each of its measures while strictly complying with privacy preserving and ethics rules of operation. POLIIICE will contribute to the LI standardization and will recommend EU regulation changes for effective adaptation of POLIIICE vision and innovative LI measures.

LAGO will deliver the foundation for a trusted EU FTC Research Data Ecosystem (RDE) to address the so-called “Data Issue” in the FCT research landscape, i.e., the lack of domain-specific data in sufficient quality and quantity to enable appropriate training and testing of the developed methods, platforms and tools. LAGO will be instrumental in identifying common barriers and subsequently providing the structural, governance and technical foundations to foster and innovate data-oriented research collaboration among LEAs, security practitioners, relevant EU agencies, academic and industry researchers, policy makers and regulators. For this purpose, LAGO will develop an evidence-based and validated multi-actor Reference Architecture for the FCT RDE for these actors to deposit, share and co-create data and tools for FCT research purposes based on common rules, protocols, standards and instruments in a trusted and secured environment. The envisaged Reference Architecture and accompanying governance framework will be based on the design principles of decentralisation, data sovereignty, data quality, openness, transparency and trust and comply with EU values and principles on data protection, privacy and ethics. The Reference Architecture will be accompanied by a TRL-7 Reference Implementation of added-value technological tools to ensure practical realisation of the Reference Architecture as multiple data spaces and across the full range of concrete usage scenarios. A Roadmap will finally provide the consolidated rules, conditions and considerations for the actual deployment of the EU FCT RDE. The ultimate ambition of LAGO is to go beyond the creation of a common repository in order to innovate the FCT data-oriented research sphere by creation the crucial foundations for the sustainable, safe and trusted creation, co-creation, sharing and maintenance of training and testing datasets for the FCT research domain.