H2020 CONCORDIA
Bruno Rodrigues' contribution to Europe's cybersecurity competence network: the economics of cybersecurity, and the DDoS Clearing House for sharing attack intelligence, where BloSS provided trustworthy cross-domain signaling.
CONCORDIA (Cyber Security Competence for Research and Innovation) was a European Horizon 2020 flagship, a 16 million euro pilot for a pan-European cybersecurity competence network spanning industry, academia, SMEs, and national cybersecurity centres, coordinated by the University of the Bundeswehr Munich. Bruno Rodrigues took part as a researcher in the Communication Systems Group at the University of Zurich, one of the consortium partners, contributing to two of its threads: the economics of cybersecurity, and the sharing of DDoS intelligence across organisations. This page describes only that contribution, not the wider project.
Cybersecurity economics
Security decisions are, in the end, economic ones. In CONCORDIA’s work on economic perspectives, we built methods to reason about the cost and value of protection. SEConomy assessed the economic impact of cybersecurity along a value chain, turning a vague expense into something that can be measured, and MENTOR recommended, for a given organisation, the protection services that fit its risk and its budget. The common thread is making security investment a decision that can be justified rather than guessed.
The DDoS Clearing House
A single network sees only its slice of a distributed attack. CONCORDIA’s DDoS Clearing House set out to let organisations share DDoS intelligence, the fingerprints of ongoing attacks, so that each could defend on the strength of what all of them had seen. This is exactly the problem BloSS was built for: a Blockchain Signaling System that lets independent, mutually-distrusting domains exchange attack evidence and coordinate mitigation with no central authority to trust. BloSS contributed the trustworthy, cross-domain signaling layer, complemented by DDoSGrid for post-mortem analysis and ProtectDDoS for recommending the right defence. The full record of these outputs is on the group’s Communication Systems Group CONCORDIA page.
What the group builds on it
CONCORDIA established the group’s expertise in collaborative, cross-domain defence under partial trust: the foundation of today’s network and systems security line, from the distributed pulse-wave DDoS simulator to decentralised identity and governance for cooperative defence.