COPCIS

Information Society is more and more becoming a Data Society. New technologies and personal habits turn data (particularly personal data) into valuable assets. Methods for analyzing information, procedures to collect data and new communication networks allow companies to store and trade with private information obtained from Internet.

At the same time, it is also possible to know the exact geo-location of virtually any user of mobile, tablet or wearable devices, since most of them are ubiquitously connected to Internet. All these technologies, while smooth out daily life chores and open new business models (e. g. IoT or cloud computing, which are fundamental for the 4.0 generation) involve at the same serious threats to cybersecurity and citizen privacy. Moreover, malware can also affect mobile devices and other types of (more sensitive) devices, such as electronic implants or pacemakers.

This dramatic expansion of the network services and their extensive use lead to an increase in the number of threats and vulnerabilities. Just think of the recent attacks against cybersecurity (cyberterrorism, malware attacks in general or ransomware attacks in particular, Advanced Persistent Threads (APT), failures provoked in information systems, computer network attacks or privacy attacks). Under this scenario, different Institutions have promoted diverse national and international strategies concerning security and cybersecurity. The coordinated project presented hereafter aims at addressing these security demands on two related fronts.

On the one hand, by developing cryptographic protocols in order to guarantee confidentiality, integrity and data availability as well as to keep personal and corporate privacy; on the other hand, by designing mathematic models to protect information by means of both the simulation of malware propagation and the study of networks managing confidential information. The current challenge is to optimize the methods for identifying both parts involved in a communication and to apply the best strategies to guarantee information authentication.

This proposal aims at designing light cryptography to protect information and defining and analyzing mathematical models to simulate malware (ransomware, zero-day malware,…) propagation in complex networks. The final goal is to equip mobile devices with adequate resources to preserve sensitive data availability and to avoid their weaknesses. In this proposal, we try not only to modify the existing protocols and models but also to propose new ones, keeping in view the security in the exchange of information and the preservation of user privacy. The pursued objective is to strike a balance between both objectives: cybersecurity improvement and maximal protection for user privacy. In brief, our goal is to improve the cybersecurity of the citizens by increasing the security of the devices they currently use