Intro
E-CORRIDOR aims at providing a flexible, secure, and privacy-aware framework allowing confidential, distributed, and edge-enabled security services in multi-modal transport systems, as threat analysis and prevention as well as privacy-aware seamless access mechanism. The consortium consists of 15 partners from 5 EU countries, with a total of 5.9 million budget.
Cyber attack influence is growing in our everyday life, and, indeed, the targets become our mobile devices, our bank accounts, or our new electric and autonomous vehicles. The need for protection of the cyber world, which often has a significant convergence with the physical one, requires that both cyber and safety aspects be managed together. The increased amount of information (and collaboration) allow for better prediction and management of cyber attacks. However, when sharing information, one wishes to retain control of the information, even when it is shared for prediction of vulnerabilities of just for accessing systems (e.g., a transport one). There are the need and the opportunity to unleash the power of sharing.
Another important scenario for highlighting the importance of data sharing while preserving privacy is the COVID-19 tracing. More and more public health organizations and authorities are using mobile apps for contact tracing and analyzing the infection status of the people using this app. Here, users share the anonymized data with other mobile phones that are in their vicinity and with authorities for analytics purposes. Besides, another direct impact of COVID on our life is that more travel barriers are set in the transport domain, such as health certificates for entering specific countries. If travelling abroad, loads of travel documents need to be shown and verified, which actually can be solved by adopting continuous and privacy-aware authentication mechanisms to realize seamless access. To summarize, data sharing and data analytics have immense potential to upgrade our economy and life modes further, but should follow a privacy- and security- by-design principle to eliminate hidden risks.
E-CORRIDOR’s mission is to define a framework for multi-modal transport systems, which provides secure advanced services for passengers and transport operators. The framework includes collaborative privacy-aware edge-enabled information sharing, analysis, and protection as a service. The project plans to show the applicability of this framework in at least two domains: (i) collaborative and confidential cyber threat management and (ii) seamless access mechanism in multi-modal transport systems. Three pilots will be conducted in E-CORRIDOR to verify the proposed ideas and outcomes, including the Airport and Train (AT) Pilot (led by ADP), Car Sharing Pilot (S2C) (led by CLEM) and Information Sharing and Analytics Centre Pilot (ISAC) (led by MISE).
Figure 1. E-CORRIDOR operational concept.
Moments of the Kick-off Meeting
E-CORRIDOR began on June 1st, 2020, with a one-day virtual kick-off meeting on July 6th, 2020. The meeting was hosted by the project coordinator Dr. Fabio Martinelli from CNR and attracted more than 40 attendees. The EC project officer Pavlos Fournogerakis affirmed the significance of E-CORRIDOR and provided more guidance in project management and implementation to ensure overall success.
Figure 2. Screenshots of the online E-CORRIDOR kick-off meeting. Top: Dr. Fabio Martinelli (coordinator) introducing the targets of E-CORRIDOR; Bottom: Pavlos Fournogerakis (EC project officer) giving a presentation on project management and success.
During the meeting, introductions to each work package and task were given, followed by a productive discussion on the technical details and next-step plans.
Even though the COVID-19 caused some barriers in our daily life and among countries, we can surely expect that E-CORRIDOR will eliminate the barriers for information sharing and trust mechanism in the multi-modal transport domains, and achieve wider success by putting our innovative outputs into practice.
