TENACE Project (Protecting National Critical Infrastructures From Cyber Threats) led by the Sapienza Research center in Cyber Intelligence and Information Security has been funded by the Italian Ministry of Education and Research in the context of PRIN program. TENACE will start February 1st 2013 and it will last for three years.
The TENACE project will investigates the protection of national critical infrastructures from cyber threats following a collaborative approach whenever appropriate. TENACE will address three scenarios: financial infrastructures, power grid and transportation systems that represent three widely different settings with distinct interdepencies, threats, vulnerabilities and possible countermeasures. TENACE has the objective of defining collaborative technical and organizational methodologies to raise the protection of such CIs with the specific target of looking at the common steps in order to develop a unifying metodology and understanding the underground economics fuelling an attacker. The study of specific CI vulnerabilities and related attacks will drive the development of algorithms, models, architectures and tools as the means to enable the effective protection of critical infrastructures enhancing their degree of security and dependability by considering a continuously evolving adversary. TENACE will address cyber attacks, combination of cyber and physical attacks and cyber fraudes in the context of power grids, transportation and financial inrastructures respectively. TENACE will integrate results developed by specific research groups in order to generate solutions addressing complex attacks in each specific CI scenario. Such solutions will be validated against real data sets.
TENACE consortium has a critical and multidisciplinary mass of academic scientists from nine among the more prestigious Italian Universities: Sapienza (CIS-UNIROMA), Politecnico di Torino (POLITO), Federico II (UNINA), Parthenope (UNIPARTHENOPE), Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI), Università di Trento (UNITN), Università di Firenze (UNIFI), Università di Pisa (UNIPI), Università di Reggio Calabria (UNIRC) and a large research Center (CNR) to produce innovative ideas, methodologies, algorithms, software artifacts and infrastructures to make CI more resilient to cyber attacks. The consortium sports 20 worldwide TENACE associated partners including SMEs, Universities and major industry players; these collaborations will help to increase the critical mass and will ensure quick dissemination and enhanced impact of TENACE's results. Finally, the project will enjoy of a premier class Advisory Board composed by major stakeholders: Finmeccanica, the The Presidency of the Board of Ministers, Symantec, Ministry of Economics and CA, that will ensure to keep TENACE on track with respect to its objectives and that such objectives target concrete cyber threats.
The project results are reported in the activities in Security Economics, Vulnerability Discover Models, Malware Analysis.
You can find some details on the project in the project official web site.