Preventing and fighting illicit material and dangerous substances postal and courier services flows in EU areas is of top priority. However, ensuring efficiency, speed and continuity in screening and detection tasks remains yet a challenge. Currently, custom, police and courier authorities involve a range of screening systems in place but there is still much to do in terms of detection efficacy and creation of intelligence towards risk and threat identification. On top of that, criminals or smugglers exploit the multitude of flows and easily spot security gaps that allow parcels or letters to be transported within or across EU with relative ease. To overcome these constraints, iFLOWS proposes a unique approach to assist customs, police and postal/courier services in preventing and detecting such crimes by improving operational readiness, enhancing situation awareness, reducing detection time, providing operational efficiency and achieving superior mission performance. iFLOWS will design, develop, integrate, test and validate a novel multi-tier synergistic Toolkit in enhancing intelligence extraction, screening and detection operations of illicit material and hazardous substances within courier and postal flows moving across and within EU borders. iFLOWS works upon these 3 building blocks to deliver a) a tailored to such operations C4I that boosts preparedness and cooperation be-tween police, customs and courier/postal services, b) enhanced Intelligence in terms of threats, risks and suspicious flows and c) novel detection technologies (i.e. THz Scanning system and UWB Scanner) featuring enhanced detection capabilities over a large span of illicit material and substances, which, coupled with advanced image-based feature extraction in combination to legacy systems (e.g. X-Ray and Raman) optimise the detection process without interrupting the postal/courier flows.

ENSURESEC is a sociotechnical solution for safeguarding the Digital Single Market’s e-commerce operations against cyber and physical threats. It combines an automatic, rigorous, distributed and open-source toolkit for protecting e-commerce, with monitoring of the impact of threats in physical space and a campaign for training SMEs and citizens aimed at creating awareness and trust. ENSURESEC addresses the whole gamut of modern e-commerce, from standard physical products purchased online and delivered via post, to entirely virtual products or services delivered online. It addresses threats ranging from maliciously modifying web e-commerce applications or rendering them unavailable to legitimate customers, to delivery issues or fraud committed by insiders or customers. It achieves this by focusing on the common software and physical sensor interfaces that sit along the e-commerce, payment and delivery ecosystem. At technical level, it integrates proven state-of-the-art inductive (machine learning) with deductive (formal methods) reasoning tools and techniques so that e-commerce operations are protected by design, as well as through continuous monitoring, response, recovery and mitigation measures at run-time. Importantly, trust of the infrastructure’s operations among its users is established, benefiting from distributed ledger technology ensuring transparency of the operations and that information has not been modified. Although ENSURESEC innovations are applicable to any critical infrastructure that relies and is monitored by networked software systems, its design and integration philosophy make it uniquely prepared to protect distributed and evolving e-commerce infrastructures with its various forms of payment and delivery (virtual, online and physical). ENSURESEC also enhances citizens’ resilience to threats and their trust in e-commerce companies, especially SMEs, thus contributing towards the vision of a reliable and trusted digital single market.

Technological advances in Information communication Technologies (ICT) as well as the digital transformation of complex systems have led to the development of novel networks, platforms and systems, which have, in turn, kick-started the realisation process for multi-faceted technological collaborations and data-driven workflows on a scale never seen before. Consequently, an integration process among the different layers of complex systems and services has been unfolding raising significant issues and challenges in its wake. Hence, the digital data and collaboration spaces are all predicated upon the realisation of what is known as the computing continuum, which is based on the integration of cloud, edge and Internet of Things (IoT). Nevertheless, this has given rise to significant security and privacy risks especially since it is about systems that involve a high number of entities and devices with different profiles, processing a vast amount of potentially sensitive info MEDIATE’s vision is to produce a robust technology, which will address the security and privacy attributes of the computing continuum. For this, it will put forth a complex architecture that is based on the concept of zero-trust and will assume a federated learning approach in order to perform security-based scrutinisation at all continuum levels. i.e. IoT, edge and cloud, using security models that can be updated, redistributed and reconfigured across it. The actual features of the MEDIATE framework will support major topic outcomes such as cybersecurity resilience through reconfiguration, vulnerabilities mitigation through cyber threat analysis, secure integration at the IoT level through software and hardware-based security sensors and trust and security for massive ecosystems through the use of federated learning-based orchestration. Moreover, it will feature AI-based tools for cyber threat intelligence that assist a decision support system and privacy policies for data and identity protection.