The SecurIST project is working to achieve a degree of consensus by bringing together lead ICT players in key security and dependability research areas under the umbrella of the European Security and Dependability Taskforce. The approach taken was the establishment of themed working groups as initiatives under the taskforce charged with the task of contributing to the development of a security road map to support future ICT security requirements. The emphasis is on developing common research links between the various themed areas. Following the initial gathering of Security and Dependability experts at dedicated networking sessions at IST 2004 held in The Hague in November 2004, and two highly successful Workshops hosted by the SecurIST project and the European Commission in January and April of 2005, the Security and Dependability Task Force has been established and formally launched.

Figure 1 contains the entire list of Working Initiatives that have been formed containing experts within the Security and Dependability community within the STF.

Figure 1. STF Working Group Initiatives

The SecurIST project, as a coordination activity, will bring cohesion to security projects within the IST framework and help to foster a common and collective set of objectives for promoting early development, deployment and awareness of security networks and solutions.

From the projects/researcher perspective, the thematic activity will assist in

• Maximising take-up and exploitation of results through exposure in wider forums.
• Establishing synergies between research activities in ICT Security Research, both across IST projects and others.
• Sharing of best practice and lessons learnt – removing the need to reinvent wheels
• Identification of obstacles to deployment (market, infrastructure, awareness, etc)
• Accessibility to a wider user platform for take-up and awareness (feedback cycle)
• Contributing to the definition of follow-on research within a wider framework.

The TSSG key role in this project has been the Coordinator and the Work package leader for the following Work packages - WP1. Project Management, WP2. European ICT Security and Dependability Task Force Establishment and Co-ordination and WP4. Dissemination and Use.

WP1. Project Management. Waterford Institute of Technology are the project coordinators of SecurIST. In WP1, WIT organised three face-to-face meetings for the project members. For the Kick off meeting, the Project handbook first draft was made available for the partners. The Handbook documents the procedures to be adopted for effective management of the SecurIST Project. The handbook contains project management structure and procedures, partner contact information, document review and submission procedures, procedures for dispute resolution and reporting procedures. As part of WP1, WIT successfully initiated the project and established and maintains effective communications between project partners. The European Commission has been particularly involved in this project due to the nature of the project so it has taken a good deal of Management time for this perspective. In February 2005, Jim Clarke joined the Waterford Institute of Technology and works primarily along with the Project Manager Dr. Willie Donnelly full time on the SecurIST project.

WP2. European ICT Security and Dependability Task Force Establishment and Co-ordination. WIT are the leader of this Workpackage and have been very pro-active here. They have organised two very successful convening Workshops see workshop 1 and workshop 2 (PDF)

in a period where only one was expected and have recruited a significant number of experts to join the Initiatives via the STF Web portal. A full listing of the STF members up to 15 th April can be found in D2.2 Convening’s of the Task Force – Report of the 2 nd Workshop held on 19 th April 2005 . In this WP, WIT have began initiating alignment with other European and Global initiatives such as ENISA, eMobility platform, NESSI Software and Services platform, Ipv6 TaskForce, BioSec, Critical Information Infrastructure Research Co-ordination (CI 2RCO) and GST (e-Safety). In addition, WIT have presented the SecurIST project to Workshop on Security organised by the Irish The Security Research Network ( Serenity) see http://www.fp6-ireland.com/news.asp?id=112&cid=905 .

WP3. ICT Security & Dependability Research Strategy beyond 2010. WIT have spearheaded the elaboration of the Strategic research agenda by listening very closely to the initiatives personnel and the speakers at the Workshops and capturing these messages into very thorough Workshop reports in a cumulative fashion. In addition, the roadmap for the next steps was clearly mapped out at the second Workshop. The strategy is to continue to r ecruit experts in each of the initiatives as required and d evelop a vision (top-down approach) and identify what we have and identify gaps (bottom-up approach from IST projects and other experts). The next step will be to develop documents for comments (DFCs) to obtain concensus on the framework taking into account relationships and dependencies with other initiatives in order to build a consistent framework to recommend the European Research priorities.

WIT are leaders of two Initiatives, namely the Application Security Initiative and the Internet Infrastructure Security Initiative. Will Fitzgerald has spent a good deal of time in establishing the Terms of references of these initiatives and contributing to the documents.

Since the second Workshop, WIT worked very closely with two of the members of the Advisory board on an Overview position document to kick start D3.1 ICT Security & Dependability Research beyond 2010 Initial strategy and to elaborate on why the European Commission should fund future research in Security and Dependability. This culminated in an excellent document circulated to the Advisory board entitled Security research framework for Europe - Empowering the citizen. This document was used as the main talking point for the Inaugural Advisory board meeting, which was held on 27 th June 2005.

A considerable amount of effort has gone into the formation of the Security Task Force initiatives (Working groups) and the elaboration and consensus of the key challenges and priorities from the new and current security technology perspective and the socio-economic areas. After publishing the Document for Comments version 1 and receiving comments from the STF Advisory Board, a dedicated Workshop was held on 4 th of October, 2005 for the STF leaders to brainstorm, present and discuss three key challenges/priorities from each of the Initiatives. While this was not meant as a limiting exercise (there are obviously more than 3 challenges/priorities for each initiative, it was more of a focussing exercise to determine, elaborate and validate the principal challenges/priorities from within the Initiatives work and to identify any overlap and/or gaps. These results were documented recently to be reviewed by the Advisory Board and will form the basis for D3.1 ICT Security & Dependability Research beyond 2010 Initial strategy. This document is now with the STF Advisory board, who met on the 5 th October 2005. The Advisory board were actioned to select three key challenges from within the results document and to elaborate three key challenges that they felt were missing from the document. It is clear from this result that the research programme will need to take a holistic approach to security, which will include new and existing technologies and a number of Socio-economic challenges and priorities were highlighted.

WP4. Dissemination and Use. WIT have led this Workpackage and Will Fitzgerald has spent a great deal of effort in establishing a Web portal, which would be very rich in content whilst being very easy to use by public and private members. The web portal was available in the first month mainly for information purposes but due to the decision to hold an early workshop, work in this work package was accelerated to add logistical event management capabilities to the web portal for the Inaugural Workshop. This was successfully done in a short period and the web portal has been enhanced significantly following comments from the other project participants. The web portal can also be used for WP1 purposes (deliverable and document control), as well as a storage and collaborative work facility for the Work Group Initiatives and the Advisory Board. The user experience was described in D4.1 Web portal launch, User Guide, which has been distributed to the project partners and the STF Initiative leaders. Extra efforts have been made to establish cross links and references to other initiatives and events of interest to the STF on the Web portal.

Jim Clarke and Will Fitzgerald have submitted a number of papers to conferences in the area of Security and Dependability. See section below.