EU-funded cybersecurity consortium kicks off in Brno, Czech Republic

Mar 13, 2023 | Masaryk University, News

Authors
Jaroslav Řezník, Principal Program Manager—Technical at Red Hat
Viktor Malík, Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat

Cybersecurity has become a critical focus of research in today’s interconnected world, especially with the rise of cyberattacks posing a threat to individuals, businesses, and governments.

The Cybersecurity Excellence Hub in Estonia and South Moravia (CHESS), an EU HORIZON project, will bring together leading cybersecurity institutions and leverage the strengths of both regions to address significant European challenges. South Moravia is a major ICT industry and education powerhouse in the Czech Republic, with a very focused and coherent smart specialization strategy aimed at cybersecurity. Estonia is one of the most advanced digital societies in the world, with exceptional e-government deployment. However, this makes it vulnerable to a variety of cyber threats.

Red Hatters Martin Ukrop, Nora Haxhidautiová, Viktor Malik and Jaorslav Řezník at CHESS kick off meeting

Red Hat is one of the consortium members, which includes Masaryk University (Faculty of Informatics, Czech Republic), University of Tartu (Estonia), CYBERNETICA AS, and others.  The project is funded by the European Commission under HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ACCESS-0 – Excellence Hubs as a four-year project with a budget of 5 million euros.

The project officially kicked off with a meeting of all participants in Brno on 26 and 27 January. Topics of the kick-off meeting spanned from administrative briefings to the Challenge Areas planning. 

The project is tackling several Challenge Areas, including:

  • Internet of Secure Things
  • Security Certification
  • Verification of Trustworthy Software
  • Blockchain
  • Post-Quantum Cryptography
  • Human-centric Aspects of Cybersecurity

Red Hat participates in two of these six Challenge Areas: Security Certification and Verification of Trustworthy Software. One of the projects involved in the CHESS project is seccerts, which has the goal of processing Common Criteria and FIPS certificates and related documents into machine-readable form to enable analysis of this data, for example to find known vulnerabilities.

Another participating project that Red Hat is involved in is DiffKemp, a tool for static analysis of semantic differences in software which aims to help with early discovery of bugs and compatibility issues in critical parts of the Linux kernel and open-source security libraries.

Email research-eu-projects-engineering@redhat.com if you are interested in contributing to the project.

To learn more about the CHESS kick-off meeting, read the article on the UT Institute of Computer Science website.

Funded by the European Union under Grant Agreement No. 101087529. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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