National Clusters pushing the JCCI growth

27th Sep 2021

European Commission has funded four different pilots for establishing a European Cybersecurity Competence centre, promoting share competences, expertise and knowledge among the institutions, stakeholders, and other members. In this context, in SPARTA project, the Joint Competence Centre Infrastructure is implemented as a solution for addressing these Commission’s needs.

The mission of a Joint Competence Centre Infrastructure is to promote and make available information about tools, infrastructure, data and learning content to all (and not only) partners and associates of SPARTA. Its objective is to be used to optimize research and innovation in cyber security, creating new services or extending those that are currently provided by third parties, offering learning, training and experimentation resources. Those singular assets can be accessed and used in similar ways to those of a Digital Innovation Hub. Such information is publicly available through the SPARTA JCCI NEXUS. The Nexus is thought like a Marketplace where the SPARTA partners and associate can promote their assets, their data and their development carried out inside one of the SPARTA Pilot or outside the project, with simple’s links and without upload any content.

Thanks to its dynamic infrastructure in which each partner is in charge of keep and make available its own information, the JCCI has involved many SPARTA partners and associates. The community is growing each day attracted by the facility to share and advertise their solutions, products, and assets without lose the control over them. Already 9 partners are joined to the dynamics JCCI, as VICOM, TECN, INOV, CNR, INRIA, KTU, SMILE, UBO and UKON and other 7 are working on deploy the JCCI Node. The Node represents the element that link the partners with the Nexus and help them to publish their information.

In particular, the JCCI promote the creation of National Cluster which can pull the involvement of more partners and associates. This is the case of the Spanish cluster, which currently is the most active community since it already involved 2 partners and 3 associates. In the next months, several national events will be organized in order to advertise and present the Spanish successful deployment and try to promote the creation of other national cluster as the Italian, French, and Germany, among the others. 

Furthermore, the JCCI allows the partners and associates the creation of a federated infrastructure in which each one can facilitate the execution of Hands-on-labs to learn and experiment with a certain type of equipment, methodology, cyberattack or countermeasure, as well as performing training exercises in a Cyber Range format. In this sense, as shown in Figure 1, several SPARTA partners are the most active in deploying this Federated Infrastructure, using different interactive access protocols, from the publication of an endpoint that allows customized secure connections (SSH) to the usage of a remote desktop solution based on noVNC protocols. In both cases, the idea is that the access to the resources could be totally integrated with JCCI authentication and authorization modules, in order to increase the security and avoid cyber-threats.

Interactive access to this equipment can be offered in different flavours and degrees of integration with the common infrastructure, from the publication of an endpoint that allows customized secure connections (SSH or VPN) that will be negotiated outside the system, to total integration with JCCI authentication and authorization modules.

In the federated infrastructure, TECN share its energy testbed and the access to its cyber-range, as well as BUT that give the access to the scenarios deployed in its KYPO platform. VICOM share the access to its Industry 4.0 testbed, INOV to its solutions deployed in a testbed and UBO to its IT-Security Awareness Measure system. CNIT and KTU allow the user to use their cyber security training platforms.

Be a part of the JCCI can improve the visibility of your achievement, development and assets in an easy way to all the cybersecurity world, as well as its Federated goal allow you to increase the participation and cooperation with other Spartans. So, what are you waiting? Join to the SPARTA JCCI