Many pressing societal challenges require information technology as part of their solution.

Halting climate change requires transformation of the energy and mobility system.

Changes in global alliances require increased digital sovereignty.

The ongoing AI revolution brings new offensive and defensive security challenges.

This Topic makes an essential contribution to the success of these transformations by scrutinizing their cybersecurity aspects from an interdisciplinary perspective. Complex socio-technical systems must be considered in their entirety to understand security and privacy implications and possible remedies.
The Topic contributes to the program’s mission “to drive […] the digital and sustainable transformation in science, technology and society, associated with major societal challenges such as climate change and Europe’s technological sovereignty.”

The Topic consists of three Subtopics that each apply a closely related set of methodological tools to a specific application field in order to tackle several long-term scientific challenges:

ST1 “Trustworthy and Resilient Critical Infrastructures” works on a method for comprehensive security evaluation of critical infrastructures that provides a scientifically sound assessment of cyber risk.

ST2 “Trustworthy Software Certification Methods” researches certification for mobility software products, going beyond the current state of the art that only certifies processes, to deliver dependable software for autonomous vehicles.

ST3 “Trustworthy Agentic Systems” develops systems that can act on their own autonomous decisions, with European democratic standards guiding those far-reaching consequences.

These Subtopics closely collaborate to advance their common goal of improving the security of future real-world systems.