Strategic Programs for Advanced Research and Technology in Europe

We are re-imagining the way cybersecurity research, innovation, and training are performed in the European Union

Cybersecurity is an urgent and major societal challenge. In correlation with the digitization of our societies, cyberthreats are having an increasing impact on our lives: it is essential to ensure digital security and strategic autonomy of the EU by strengthening its cybersecurity capacities. This challenge will require the coordination of Europe’s best competences, along with strong international cooperations, towards common research and innovation goals.

SPARTA is a novel cybersecurity competence network, with the objective to collaboratively develop and implement top-tier research and innovation actions. Strongly guided by concrete challenges forming an ambitious Cybersecurity Research & Innovation Roadmap, SPARTA will tackle hard innovation challenges, leading the way in building transformative capabilities and forming a world-leading cybersecurity competence network across the EU. Four initial research and innovation programs will push the boundaries to deliver advanced solutions to cover emerging issues, with applications from basic human needs to economic activities, technologies, and sovereignty.

Become a SPARTA Associate

It's a tough road ahead

With one of the most advanced and multi-cultural research ecosystem in the world, the European Union has the means to take on the cybersecurity challenge. Its scientists have the opportunity to become a unique innovation force in cybersecurity with transformative impacts on our economy, infrastructures, society, and democracy.

Yet many challenges need to be addressed before such a vision can be successful.

These first three items are instrumental to foster a culture of risk-taking – a critical asset for creativity in the face of innovative threats.

These last three items are absolutely key to ensure that the SPARTA network will produce concrete and transformative results. More importantly, they are instrumental in making these results suitable for a wide variety of applications in vertical sectors, creating technological vantage points and economic leverage.

Organizing tomorrow's research activities

Governance activities form the backbone of the network, supporting community activities that range from roadmap design to Request for Challenges, from monthly SPARTA Workshops to bi-yearly SPARTA Days. Research programs are continuously spun from strands of the roadmap, led by experts of their fields, and aim at generating concrete and transformative results.

Develop an ambitious Cybersecurity Research and Innovation Roadmap leveraging Europe’s strengths and opportunities, across multiple disciplines, maturity levels, and geographical locations.

Set up space, time, and means to enable research collaborations, leveraging the strengths of existing structures and organisations around a Joint Competence Center Infrastructure.

Explore innovative work in full- spectrum situational awareness, with the goal of enabling the supervision of complex systems over heterogeneous time scales.

Develop a foundation for secure- by-design intelligent infrastructure built on strong formal approaches, addressing multiple cybersecurity facets.

Investigate new avenues for continuous assessment and new evaluation tools and techniques for handling tomorrow's dynamic and elastic digital systems.

Devise approaches to make systems using AI more reliable and resilient through enhanced explainability and better threat understanding.

Foster the emergence of a thriving and responsible research and innovation model, allowing the development of unique innovation paths, contributing to European strategic autonomy.

Establish unparalleled traction with European, national, and regional ecosystems, relaying concrete requirements, disruptive ideas, and novel results through multi-level and cross-network actions and events.

We are Spartans

SPARTA brings together a unique set of actors at the intersection of scientific excellence, technological innovation, and societal sciences in cybersecurity.

CEA coordinates SPARTA and heads the strategic direction.
Joanneum Research contributes to the development of next generation cybersecurity technologies like sophisticated network and security scanning tools.
Technikon contributes to the CCN organization and assessment and supports the continuous improvement and networking of the governance.
CETIC leads SPARTA's activities on certification organisation and support.
UNamur contributes to all the tasks that require legal expertise in the field of privacy and, more specifically, data protection, in particular by assessment of data protection and other ICT regulatory issues.
CESNET develops new network security approaches, especially resilience of network against attacks. It validates the governance structure by joint research, development and evaluation tasks.
Brno University of Technology serves as the technological competence center in the Czech Republic with a focus on privacy-enhancing cryptologic technologies for IoT networks and on cybersecurity training and education.
CZ.NIC reflects its own rich experience gained both from the operation of the national security team CSIRT.CZ and the development of unique security by design hardware.
Fortiss increases the awareness of the Bavarian and German industry to security concerns, increasing the security of their products, by proposing and demonstrating techniques and methodologies.
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft is leading Ethical, Legal and Societal Aspects (ELSA) of cybersecurity according to the contemporary approach of responsible research and innovation. It is also leading the task on (internal) governance assessment and recommendations.
SAP performs research on the security of software supply chains, in particular the use of Open Source Software. It contributes to certification methodologies for large-scale, dynamic software environments.
Technische Universitat Munchen develops tools and mechanisms to increase the security of software components on different layers. In addition to these research focused efforts, TUM also leads the SPARTA committee.
Universitat Bonn provides expert knowledge about IT security awareness and threat intelligence.
Universitat Konstanz contributes capabilities in development of visualizations and visual analytics techniques as well as the involvement of experts and their domain knowledge.
University of Tartu is active in several fields related to cryptographic protocols, security engineering, business process management, programming languages, network coding and software engineering, and distributed system development.
KEMEA is strongly involved in cybersecurity scenario/use-cases building, pilot testing, educational workshop organization and execution, evaluation analysis and validation activities.
Demokritos contributes risk tools in the cyber physical domain and will contribute to the Vertical 1 in the CAPE Program, introducing the risk assessment mode of interconnected systems to the manufacturing and IoT domain.
Fundacio Eurecat is a contributor to some of the tasks or programs related to the following domains: threat intelligence, artificial intelligence techniques for cybersecurity, embedded devices cybersecurity.
Indra develops tools, techniques and algorithms for the stages of prevention, detection, mitigation and protection. Indra will offer these results to the business community and public entities.
Fundacion Tecnalia takes part in the development and implementation of the SPARTA cybersecurity roadmap covering its areas of competence as well as industrial challenges in sectors like the energy, automotive, transport and health.
Fundation Vicomtech leads the task related to the establishment of the SPARTA Joint Competence Centre Infrastructure. In addition to working on machine-learning techniques, t has a leading role in Innovation Management.
ANSSI contributes to the elaboration of the R&D roadmap, the training program, and the impact study of the technical programs on certification capacities of the SPARTA Network.
IMT leads the CAPE program and provides access to its research platforms in order to carry out research and demonstration work. It contributes to education programs and training support materials.
Inria delivers research through its research teams and provide training of PhD students. It will provide access to its research platforms and security laboratories as part of its contribution to the work on research and demonstrators.
Thales contributes to the T-SHARK and SAFAIR programs, as well as exploitation, certification, and dissemination efforts.
Yes We Hack connects organizations or projects with European ethical hackers community, strengthening cooperation to improve the common good.
CINI leads the HAII-T program and brings expertise in a number of key research areas, including formal modeling and automatic analysis of security-critical components, protocols and systems, vulnerability-tolerance techniques, and more.
CNIT brings contibutions in three main areas: network monitoring and intrusion detection, network infrastructure security architectures and solutions, and security protocols for data communication and dissemination.
CNR is directing SPARTA's partnership efforts and contributes to the community building and research activities.
ISCOM contributes to the impact study of programs on certification capabilities, the definition of the training framework, and the monitoring and assessment of project results.
Leonardo contributes to the design and implementation of the whole SPARTA platform, and to the component integration and platform testing activities.
Kauno Technologijos Universitetas contributes to the research activities of the cybersecurity threat intelligence, of the network and IoT. It also contributes to the training of information technology and cybersecurity professionals.
L3CE coordinates the implementation of the T-SHARK program, and takes responsibility for the development of the cybersecurity skills framework model.
The general Jonas Zemaitis Academy of Lithuania is involved in full-spectrum cyber-security awareness and threats.
Mykolo Romerio Universitetas participates in implementation of programs and activities by addressing relevant legal challenges, in particular, privacy and data protection issues.
Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology develops cognitive effective visual syntax for security risk management, and specify key components of an orchestration framework for Intelligent Infrastructures.
Security made in Lëtzebuerg participates in the organisation of the cybersecurity competence network, relaying training and awareness resources and platforms, and leading the exploitation and IPR management activities.
Université de Luxembourg contributes to the development of research advancements in the project, including resilience mechanisms in the HAII-T program, and automated detection and remediation in the CAPE program.
Latvijas Mobilais Telefons participates in the T-SHARK program by testing and validating results from the viewpoint of a service provider.
ITTI leads the SAFAIR program, and will work on defensive and reactive security measures.
Naukowa I Akademicka siec Komputerowa provides CERT and NISM experience, and investigates novel methods for large- scale malware analysis monitoring attacks through honeypot networks and countering botnet activity.
Polish Platform for Homeland Security focuses on cybercrime expertise, cooperation with LEA, training employees of public and private institutions, and increasing cybersecurity awareness.
Instituto de novas Technologies leads SPARTA's dissemination and communication activities, including the engagement of Europe's Outermost Regions, and gender and diversity issues. It will engage in the T-SHARK program.
Instituto Superior Tecnico covers a wide range of cyber security disciplines, including crypto algorithms, protocol verification, software security, distributed systems security, cyber hacking and hardware security.
Join us
SPARTA Associates benefit from early access to the results produced by the project. Through their contributions they have unique opportunities to shape the roadmap, infrastructures, and operations of network.