Gravitation Grant for 'Challenges in Cyber Security'

Cyber security is often portrayed as an educational problem or a resource problem, shifting blame on users, system administrators, or the budget holders limiting the system administrators’ abilities. However, there are many hard problems that remain unsolved and that require a coordinated scientific investigation. The “Challenges in Cyber Security” project brings together top researchers from the hard sciences areas of cyber security to tackle these hard open problems. It is led by Eindhoven University of Technology and has been rewarded 21.5 million for a 10-year program. UvA-scientists Christian Schaffner, Zoltan Mann, Francesco Regazzoni, Kostas Papagiannopoulos and Karst Koymans from the Informatics Institute are also involved in the project.

Schaffner: ‘I’m really excited to get started with this big cybersecurity project. Together with the other consortium partners led by Tanja Lange (TU/e), Herbert Bos (VU), Lejla Batina (RU) and Marten van Dijk (CWI), we are taking a systematic approach to make sure our cyber systems are secure. For example, we address long-term security by looking ahead to the time when quantum computers could break the encryption that keeps our online data safe right now. Even though that might be years away, bad actors could collect encrypted information today and crack it open later when they have the right tools. So we’re getting ahead of the game to protect our data for the future.’

‘Challenges in Cyber Security’ is one of seven research projects that received an NWO Gravitation grant this year,