An international interdisciplinary team led by Royal Holloway, University of London won a funding award from the International Cyber Security Center of Excellence (INCS-CoE) Digital Trust Sandpit Challenge.

An international interdisciplinary team led by Royal Holloway, University of London won a funding award from the International Cyber Security Center of Excellence (INCS-CoE) Digital Trust Sandpit Challenge.

Dr Konstantinos Mersinas (Primary Investigator, Information Security Group), Prof Niki Panteli (Digital Innovation Management) and Dr Marc Sel (independent consultant; RHUL PhD alumnus) from RHUL teamed up with colleagues Dr Naghmeh Karimi and Dr Roberto Yus from University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), and Dr Takao Kondo and Dr Satoshi Kai from Keio University Tokyo, to compete at the Digital Trust Sandpit Challenge hosted by Northeastern University. The Sandpit competition included teams formed between 6 UK, US and Japanese universities and the awarded funding will serve as the initial project for follow-on research and tech transition to the industry.

The ability for countries to interact to enable the secure and trustworthy exchange of modern services, products and data requires a practical security framework with mechanisms, policies, laws and regulations based on mutual recognition. Such frameworks exist at the national and regional level, but there are international differences. As an indicative example, Japan has recently established a new Digital Agency and has been assisted by Keio University focusing on mutual recognition schemes.

It is vital that the UK plays a proactive role in the area of international digital trust, especially in the light of post-Brexit trade deals with Japan and the USA. The project aims to create an ontology-based interoperability solution amongst UK, US and Japan for mutual recognition of trust, capturing private sector (supply chains) and public sector (law enforcement) trust requirements at different assurance levels. The overall driving interest encompasses the Data Free Flow with Trust (DFFT) vision advocated by the World Economic Forum.

The team will utilise the Electronic Identification, Authentication and Trust Services (eIDAS) framework as a baseline, analysing regulatory, institutional, technical and human aspects of digital trust. The project approach expands the pillars for trust service schemes identified by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) to include human perceptions of trust and user acceptance.

For more information, please contact the project leader, Dr Konstantinos Mersinas at Konstantinos.Mersinas (at) rhul.ac.uk