NEWS

Special Research Project SPyCoDe funded

Security and privacy are human rights, which should hold in the digital society too. The security and privacy by design principle, advocated in the new European GDPR, dictates that data protection should be embedded since the early design phase of IT infrastructures. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art  technologies are inadequate to realize this principle, as witnessed by the number of attacks and breaches that are regularly discovered in the digital applications and services we use in our daily life. Without security and privacy, large-scale digitalization is simply not possible. For all these reasons, security and privacy is a research field with extraordinary technological, societal, and economical impact.

SPyCoDe aims at creating the technological foundations to realize the security and privacy by design principle, offering companies methods and tools to build large-scale, complex systems that are secure and privacy-preserving by construction, based on the safe composition of their components. This research crosscuts computer science, combining breakthroughs in logics, system security, and cryptography.

Austria has a young and internationally leading research community in these fields, which shines for research excellence: the team hosts 6 ERC grant holders as well as several young researchers who already received prestigious awards. We are really excited about the strategic development that FWF has enabled: SPyCoDe brings together five different institutions (TU Wien, TU Graz, IST Austria, Universität Wien, and Universität Klagenfurt) into an internationally leading distributed research center, which will establish a comprehensive and advanced know-how pipeline encompassing teaching, basic research, and technology transfer in the field of security and privacy.