The focus of the SENTINELS program is on two application
areas that are essential for Dutch industry and government:
Security and privacy for ambient intelligence.
The prime focus is on the user, who is
seen as surrounded by a world full of networked computing elements.
The think tank of the European Commission on Ambient
Intelligence [18] foresees that security and privacy in
ambient intelligence require a radically new concept of `conformable'
security, in which the degree and nature of security adapts over time
and in space to conform to evolving circumstances. Current security is
almost rigid by comparison. This is not only a totally new security
paradigm, but the size of the Ambient Intelligence Space with
potentially many billions of devices of many different types, creates
significant research challenges.
Security and privacy for e-government and e-business, including vital
ICT and telecommunication infrastructure. The prime
focus is on the provider of services, content, and equipment.
Currently, E-government is mostly one-directional, where the government
provides electronic access to various information sources. Real,
bi-directional communication is still rare, mainly because the security
infrastructure is not yet able to properly authenticate citizens
(and the government), to protect communication and to handle
non-repudiation. Several initiatives are underway, for instance using PKI
support in the realms of social security and tax collection.
One of the
more challenging plans is to allow electronic voting in the Netherlands
for the European elections of 2004. This will be realized by LogicaCMG,
at first only for voters living abroad. The Ministry of Internal Affairs
has organized a panel of security experts from academia and industry
to monitor the implementation of these plans. Several of these experts
are also involved in SENTINELS. Further initiatives are foreseen along
these lines, in order to raise the level and quality of interaction and
participation for citizens. Proper security guarantees are essential
to convince people to optimally use such new communication facilities.
In both these areas extensive use is made of the standard
security tools such as smart cards, biometrics, cryptography etc.,
as listed in section 3.5.
The required expertise is available in the Netherlands,
although strengthening by SENTINELS is needed to make the two
focus areas of significant economic and scientific value.
These focus areas have been selected by security experts from finance,
government, industry, research institutes and universities as explained
in section 2.7.
In the first area
the emphasis lies on the individual user, who is mostly concerned
about having access to his own data and resources at any time and any
place with proper protection levels against intrusion and interference
by unauthorized parties. Additionally, in the second area the emphasis is
on organizations, like businesses and governments (at
various levels). Their interest is not only in improving access and production
via digital means, but also in reliability, non-vulnerability and
continuity, so
appropriate protection, detection and response measures are required
in case of unauthorized intrusion. This includes the vital
ICT and telecommunication infrastructure.
To achieve the overall aim of SENTINELS (to contribute to a
secure systems engineering method), the contributions from all
projects must fit in one (or both) of these two application
areas. Projects will target one of the two application areas and
provide methodological results specific to that area. Projects are
expected to show how effective the specific methods are, and to what
extent the results generalize and as such contribute to the
SENTINELS aim.
The (inter)national expert referees, the Program Committee and the
participating companies will be able to hold to these focus areas
as follows (for the detailed procedures see
chapter 7):
both the national and the international referees will ensure
that duplicate, redundant or irrelevant research will not be done;
the Program Committee will make sure that the research is
relevant for Dutch society by its priority order of the research proposals
(this originates
from the evaluation items and Program Committee members from finance,
government, industry, research institutes and universities);
companies are contributing to research proposals by providing
a certain percentage of the project budget
(see section 7.1), which (of course) they will only do
when they believe the research is important for their company or
for Dutch society.
We believe that these methods for giving directions to
SENTINELS guarantee that the program will remain on course
to deliver technological innovations and economic benefit.
Log in
Sentinels
General info
