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.

Implementing cryptography on embedded devices is an ongoing challenge: every year new implementation flaws are discovered and new attack paths are being used by real life adversaries. Whilst cryptography can guarantee many security properties, it crucially depends on the ability to keep the used keys secret even in face of determined adversaries. Over the last two decades a new type of adversary has emerged, able to obtain, from the cryptographic implementation, side channel leakage such as recording of response times, power or EM signals, etc. To account for such adversaries, sophisticated security certification and evaluation methods (Common Criteria, EMVCo, FIPS…) have been established to give users assurance that security claims have withstood independent evaluation and testing. Recently the reliability of these evaluations has come into the spotlight: the Taiwanese citizen card proved to be insecure, and Snowden’s revelations about NSA's tampering with FIPS standards eroded public confidence. REASSURE will (1) improve the efficiency and quality of all aspects of certification using a novel, structured detect-map-exploit approach that will also improve the comparability of independently conducted evaluations, (2) cater for emerging areas such as the IoT by automating leakage assessment practices in order to allow resistance assessment without immediate access to a testing lab, (3) deliver tools to stakeholders, such as reference data sets and an open-source leakage simulator based on instruction-level profiles for a processor relevant for the IoT, (4) improve existing standards by actively pushing the novel results to standardization bodies. REASSURE's consortium is ideal to tackle such ambitious tasks. It features two major circuits manufacturers (NXP, IDEMIA), a highly respected side channel testing lab (Riscure), an engaged governmental representative (ANSSI), and two of the most prominent research institutions in this field (UCL, University of Bristol).