The rapid evolution of ICT has revealed the potential for centrally monitoring, controlling, and optimising the power grid. In this context, a more intelligent, responsive, and efficient, system has been devised, known as the Smart Grid (SG). As explained in the EU Third Energy Package the SG will support a dynamic two-way information exchange between utility companies and their customers, contributing towards a smart and sustainable energy management in Europe and the establishment of a wiser energy consumption mentality. However, besides the benefits of such an endeavour, the power grid will be exposed to security threats inherited from the ICT sector, while privacy issues and new vulnerabilities, related to the specific characteristics of the SG infrastructure, will emerge. The problem is assessed as crucial, if we consider that a potential attack to the SG may lead to cascading failures, ranging from destruction of other interconnected critical infrastructures to loss of human lives. Thus, the development of a security platform tailored to the SG is required, that i) can efficiently manage the plethora of SG nodes, ii) deal with potential malicious hardware or software modifications due to the physical access of the customers to the SG nodes, and iii) operate over heterogeneous systems. Considering all the above, SealedGRID aims at bringing together experts from industry and academia from cross-sectorial research areas having complementary background with the long-term goal to design, analyse, and implement a scalable, highly trusted and interoperable SG security platform. The platform will combine, for the very first time, technologies like Blockchain, Distributed Hash Tables, Trusted Execution Environments, and OpenID Connect, while for its realization the SealedGRID consortium is committed to a fully-integrated and multi-disciplinary secondment programme combined with a set of networking, dissemination, and exploitation activities.

Digital evidence is currently an integral part of criminal investigations, and not confined to pure cybercrime cases. Criminal behaviours like financial frauds, intellectual property theft, industrial espionage, and terrorist networks leverage the Internet and cyberspace. The very ubiquity of digital devices, e.g. smartphones, in modern society makes digital evidence extremely relevant for investigations about all kinds of criminal behaviour like murder, contraband activities, and people smuggling, to name a few. Due to its nature, the use of digital evidence in a court of law has always been challenging. It is critical that it should be accompanied by a proper chain of custody, guaranteeing its source and integrity. LOCARD aims to provide a holistic platform for chain of custody assurance along the forensic workflow, a trusted distributed platform allowing the storage of digital evidence metadata in a blockchain. Each node of LOCARD will be able to independently set its own permission policies and to selectively share access to digital evidence with other nodes when deemed necessary and upon proper authorization through fine-grained policies. LOCARD's modularity will also allow diverse actors to tailor the platform to their specific needs and role in the digital forensic workflow, from preparation and readiness, to collection, to analysis and reporting. LOCARD will have a crowdsource module to collect citizen reports of selected violations, a crawler to detect and correlate online deviant behaviour, and a toolkit for investigators that will assist them in collecting online and offline evidence. This will be powered by an immutable storage and an identity management system that will protect privacy and handle access to evidence data using a Trusted Execution Environment. Blockchain technology will not only guarantee that information about the evidence cannot be tampered with, but allow interoperability without the need for a trusted third party.