Second International Workshop on Cybersecurity Certification

The CyberCert workshop was organised by SPARTA partners together with the three other H2020 pilot projects CyberSec4Europe, Concordia and ECHO. The four projects are all aiming in establishing a European Cybersecurity Competence Network and developing a common European Cybersecurity Research & Innovation Roadmap. More info can be found here: https://www.cetic.be/cybercert2021

Aim and Scope

With the entry into force of the EU Cybersecurity Act on June 27 2019, a EU wide cybersecurity certification framework is under definition for information and communication technology (ICT) products, services, and processes. One of the motivations for the adoption of this new EU regulation is that “the limited use of certification leads to individual, organizational and business users having insufficient information about the cybersecurity features of ICT products, ICT services, and ICT processes, which undermines trust in digital solutions.” The Cybersecurity Act aims to improve trust in products, services, and processes by defining an EU-wide certification framework consisting of cybersecurity certification schemes that specify common cybersecurity requirements and evaluation criteria across national markets and sectors. Cybersecurity certification will be voluntary, and only sector specific standards will specify the conditions under which cybersecurity certification will be mandatory. The underlying assumption in the EU cybersecurity act is that products, services and processes that are certified will be viewed as more trustworthy by users. Companies going through certification would thus benefit from a competitive advantage. Cybersecurity certification suffers from an image as a costly and time consuming process. One of the keys to success for the EU cybersecurity act is to promote standards that are lightweight, flexible and incremental in order to encourage organisations to voluntarily certify their ICT products, services, and processes. New Certification schemes are currently under definition as part of the rolling work programme in the areas of industrial systems and cloud services. Processes for the evaluation and review of schemes are planned (Article 49(8)). Such reviews can lead to updates to the certification schemes. The objective of the workshop is to establish a state of the art in the area of cybersecurity certification, and to provide a forum for exchange of ideas between researchers working on cybersecurity and certification issues, and security experts whose technologies could be applied to certification. CyberCert 2021 seeks high-quality research and experimentation contributions in the form of well-developed full papers. Topics of interest encompass research advances in all areas of security, trust and privacy in relation to certification. Topics of particular interest are the following: how to determine and measure the usefulness of certification schemes, how to share certification evidence, lightweight certification schemes, approaches that integrate certification processes within security engineering processes and, incremental certification. CyberCert 2021 brings together security and privacy experts in academia, industry and government as well as practitioners, standards developers and policy makers.