In the domain of Cybersecurity Research and innovation, European scientists hold pioneering positions in fields such as cryptography, formal methods, or secure components. Yet this excellence on focused domains does not translate into larger-scale, system-level advantages. Too often, scattered and small teams fall short of critical mass capabilities, despite demonstrating world-class talent and results. Europe’s strength is in its diversity, but that strength is only materialised if we cooperate, combine, and develop common lines of research. Given today’s societal challenges, this has become more than an advantage – an urgent necessity. Various approaches are being developed to enhance collaboration at many levels. Europe’s framework programs have sprung projects in cybersecurity over the past thirty years, encouraging international cooperation and funding support actions. More recently, the Cybersecurity PPP has brought together public institutions and industrial actors around common roadmaps and projects. While encouraging, these efforts have highlighted the need to break the mould, to step up investments and intensify coordination. The SPARTA proposal brings together a unique set of actors at the intersection of scientific excellence, technological innovation, and societal sciences in cybersecurity. Strongly guided by concrete and risky challenges, it will setup unique collaboration means, leading the way in building transformative capabilities and forming world-leading expertise centres. Through innovative governance, ambitious demonstration cases, and active community engagement, SPARTA aims at re-thinking the way cybersecurity research is performed in Europe across domains and expertise, from foundations to applications, in academia and industry.

The challenge of mitigating advanced cyber attacks through advanced security training has been evident during the last decade in numerous fields and industries in EU. Despite the wide spectrum of such tools appears to provide a comprehensive machinery for detecting and responding effectively to cyber attacks, it is difficult to establish effective tool usage strategies and processes for addressing the ever-expanding land-scape of these attacks. Moreover, the advent of more “intelligent” cybersecurity solutions, which make use of technologies like machine learning, statistical analysis and user behaviour analysis, requires sophisticated and hands-on training of the key personnel of organizations, who have responsibility for security, for the latter to be able to master them. In response to the above, THREAT-ARREST will develop an advanced training platform incorporating emulation, simulation, serious gaming and visualization capabilities to adequately prepare stakeholders with different types of responsibility and levels of expertise in defending high-risk cyber systems and organizations to counter advanced, known and new cyber attacks. The THREAT-ARREST platform will deliver security training, based on a model driven approach where cyber threat and training preparation models, specifying the potential attacks, the security controls of cyber systems against them, and the tools that may be used to assess the effectiveness of these controls, will drive the training process, and align it with operational cyber system security assurance mechanisms to ensure the relevance of training. The platform will also support trainee performance evaluation and training program evaluation and adapt training programs based on them. The effectiveness of the framework will be validated using a prototype implementation at TRL-7 inter-connected with real cyber systems pilots in the area of smart energy, healthcare and shipping, and from technical, legal and business perspectives.