On 17th June 2010, there was a CoMiFin Financial Advisory Board meeting held in Rome. The meeting concentrated on the dissemination of the status of the CoMiFin prototype 1 including a demonstration of a storyboard based development of a Semantic Room (SR) for both Intrusion Detection and Man in the Middle attacks. The following elements were shown in the demonstration:

- SR Management functions that can be activated from the CoMiFin portal;

- SR Service provisioning and related interactions;

- SR service monitoring through the Dashboard that shows metrics and alerts;

- Data gathering and event processing.

In addition to providing valuable feedback on the demonstrations, the FAB members also provided assistance in developing an agenda for an upcoming EU-US workshop that will be held between the CoMiFin project and Sandia National Laboratories (www.sandia.gov). In addition, the PARSIFAL project key recommendations and outcomes were presented to the FAB members.

The DG-INFSO F5 Trust and Security project INCO-TRUST held a workshop on 4-5th May 2010 in New York City.  The workshop was co-organised by the National Science Foundation, Rutgers University and the INCO-TRUST project. The main focus of the workshop was International Data Exchange with Security and Privacy: Applications, Policy, Technology, and Use. There were delegates from EU, US, Korea, Japan, Australia, Canada, South Africa and Brazil.

The workshop slides will be available shortly at the workshop web site.

Parsifal (Protection And tRuSt In FinanciAL infrastructures) is a Coordination Action project, funded by the FP7 Programme under the Strategic Objective: ICT-SEC-2007.1.7 (Critical Infrastructure Protection).

The project began in September 2008 and completed in February 2010. Close ties between CoMiFin and Parsifal have led to a number of successful events and a shared stakeholder group.

• Parsifal examined how to better protect Critical Financial Infrastructures (CFIs) and, to this end, returned eight specific recommendations. These recommendations relate to research topics which require attention in order to reduce the risk of CFI attack/degradation. The recommendations are divided amongst three areas: Controlling instant on-demand business; Entitlement management and securing content in a perimeter-less environment; and, Continuity and control in an interdependent service landscape.
• Deliverables for the project can be found here.

The ESRIF (European Security Research and Innovation Forum) final report was recently released and it is now available here. The ESRIF strategy group was setup by the European Commission with the support of the European community to examine the civil security of Europe. Of particular interest to CoMiFin was Working Group 2: Security of Critical Infrastructures. The consideration of financial infrastructure as a key critical infrastructure for Europe was again highlighted (in Topic 8). The level of importantance of financial infrastructure was reflected by finance being included in WG2 sub-groups and WG2 panels.

From the report: "critical infrastructures protection research should place emphasis on risk management, including prediction, prevention, ensuring service continuity and rapid recovery in the event of an incident. Security characteristics therefore should be designed to increase systemic and inherent resilience."

This ethos is summed up nicely: "In three words, what critical infrastructures in Europe need is a culture of resilience". The role of the CoMiFin project in protecting Financial Critical Infrastructure places it at the heart of a resiliant and survivable Europe.

From the 11th to the 13th of January 2010 the 5th plenary meeting for CoMFin was held. The event was hosted by IBM R&D Labs Haifa, Isreal. The agenda included technical and management discussions as well as general information sharing. Below is a picture of the CoMiFin Consortium.

From Left to Right

Standing: Roberto Baldoni, Abdelmajid Khelil, Mirco Marchetti, Eliezer Dekel,  Michele Colajanni, Massimo Santelli, Barry Mulcahy, Atle Dingsor, Giorgia Lodi, György Csertán,  László Gönczy.

Front: Gábor Urbanics,  Enrico Angori,  Gregory Chockler, Gennady Laventman.

The RISEPTIS report , ‘Trust in the Information Society’, which makes recommendations on future trust and security research challenges, was published in November, 2009. To date, over 1,500 hard copies of the report have been disseminated to various interested parties, both across Europe and globally. Additionally, the Report has been downloaded from the Think-Trust website 3,332 times, giving a total distribution of over 4,800 copies of ‘Trust in the Information Society’.

To provide an accessibility point for its high-level recommendations, the Report tells six interwoven short-stories about a young couple – Jorge and Theresa – and their (mostly) electronic interactions with the surrounding environment as they go on their merry way.The six main RISEPTIS recommendations formed the basis for the recent Trustworthy ICT conference in Leon, Spain.

An article introducing CoMiFin to the European research community was accepted for publication in the European CIIP Newsletter (ECN), Volume 5, Number 2 (August/September 2009).

From the Article: "The goal of the FP7 STREP project CoMiFin is to create a federated, distributed and collaborative network of agents for enhancing trustworthiness and dependability of financial infrastructures."

The full article is available online

In conjunction with the Swedish Presidency of the European Union the next Future Internet Assembly conference will be held in Stockholm and Kista Science City on November 23-24, 2009. The conference is hosted by KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

Learn more here .

The EU FP7 project CoMiFin (Communication Middleware for Monitoring Financial CI) launched on the 1st of September 2008. The collaborative project has 9 partners from across Europe, the project will run for a duration of 30 months.

The first CoMiFin meeting was hosted by ElsagDatamat S.p.A. in Rome on September 25^th-26^th2008.