(From our “Scientific & Technical Highlights”, ed. 2020)
The Pulse Program is working on new applications for the industry of the future, smart cities and silver economy. These new products must be reliable, secure and resilient in order to find their markets and be embraced by our fellow citizens. Data management must be safe and secure.
Trust is indeed becoming a hot topic in our new hyper-digital society, as shown recently by concerns on health tracking applications or on autonomous vehicles. It is precisely why Nanoelec Pulse program
has been gradually focusing on digital trust since 2016, not only by exploring the field of cybersecurity in itself, but also the issues of operational reliability and ergonomics.
New vulnerabilities are constantly identified and are brought to public attention, creating new fears on digital technologies as medical devices, cars, industrial or urban equipment become massively connected and soon autonomous. This bad buzz impacts badly industrial players who did not sufficiently protect their products, usually with business losses and sometimes legal consequences.
Designing secure product is not yet a common practice and cybersecurity is often viewed, by product developers, more as a constraint and less important than the overall service provided, the product costs, its performance or its ergonomics. Security is rarely standardized and not a sale argument for most customers. But due to cybercrime development, legislative framework around cybersecurity is evolving in Europe, paving the way to new cybersecurity techs and tools.
With its partners, Pulse demonstrates the value of solutions powered by new technologies through five major projects. Security-bydesign is indeed becoming a new requirement for digital systems.
These projects are on the safety of autonomous vehicles, new security hardware components, and tools for industrial IoT security. Pulse also works on new tools for a safe and secure aging place for elders.
