Making cybersecurity provable

Cyber attacks on companies and public institutions are increasing rapidly worldwide. The PROTECT project, funded by the Cyber Agency, is developing solutions to make IT systems more resistant to these threats. Coordinated by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and in collaboration with leading partners from industry and research, the project pursues a clear goal: using innovative methods of formal verification to raise IT security to a new level and to strengthen trust in digital systems.

The approach builds on the three strengths of the partners involved:

1. Bottom-up instead of top-down. We combine the existing approaches of our partners . Thus, we make use of existing strengths instead of forcing project partners into a predetermined corset of existing methods. At the same time, this approach allows users to select the appropriate methods for their use case from the combined methods.

2. Open source and open science. Our work is published as open source or open access, making it as widely available as possible.

3. Research-driven. All scientific partners are highly established in their respective fields of application and contribute this research strength to the project in a profitable way. From a technical point of view, we use progressive technologies and languages: advanced verification techniques, SAIL for ISA specification, a series of reference system architectures based on RISC-V, and Rust as implementation language.

PROTECT is part of the “Ecosystem of verifiable IT” (EvIT) program and is funded by the Agency for Innovation in Cybersecurity GmbH (Cyberagentur).