EDF Project Successfully Acquires NEWSROOM

28 July 2023

As part of a call for proposals under the European Commission’s European Defense Fund (EDF) program, a consortium comprising three universities and 14 industrial companies has successfully secured the “NEWSROOM – Adapting Cyber Awareness for Evolving Computing Environments” project, with a total budget of approximately ten million euros. The University of the German Armed Forces in Munich is also involved in this project as a partner through its Research Institute CODE and the Chair of Business Informatics in the Faculty of Computer Science.

Cyberspace has become an increasingly contested military domain. To mitigate serious incidents with immediate consequences for critical, military, and civilian infrastructure, strategic cooperation between EU member states and their allies in cyber defense is necessary. The first step toward effective defense is to establish comprehensive situational awareness, which forms the foundation for any successful countermeasure. The goal of Cyber Security Awareness (CSA) is to provide stakeholders and personnel at all levels and branches of the chain of command with the most accurate information possible about the current threat landscape and to tailor this information to the individual needs of users.

Establishing CSA, particularly across sectors and countries, is a complex task that requires the successful integration of research findings from various fields, including data and cyber threat intelligence (CTI) collection, collaborative and federated learning, classification of attack behavior, visualization techniques, cryptography for CTI exchange and trust, as well as deception technologies and digital twins. However, current solutions do not offer full integration of all the necessary technologies and tools to create a holistic CSA picture.

The main objective of NEWSROOM is therefore to overcome current limitations by examining all relevant CSA aspects and developing an integrated CSA platform that combines data insights, collaborative intrusion detection for attack classification, and the exchange of information and CTI, while taking military aspects into account.

Further information on the NEWSROOM project can be found in the fact sheet:

https://defence-industry-space.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2023-06/NEWSROOM-Factsheet_EDF22.pdf

Local Contact Point at RI CODE:

PD Dr. habil. Corinna Schmitt
Forschungsinstitut CODE
Universität der Bundeswehr München
E-Mail: corinna.schmitt@unibw.de

Local Contact Point at the Chair of Business Informatics:

Prof. Dr. Ulrike Lechner
Fakultät für Informatik
Universität der Bundeswehr München
E-Mail: ulrike.lechner@unibw.de

^{This project has received funding from the European Defence Fund (EDF) under grant agreement EDF-2022-RA-CSACE-NEWSROOM.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.}

^{Photo: © Freepik/DCStudio}