- The IOTA Foundation together with the ENSURESEC consortium has been awarded a project by the European Commission to develop a secure infrastructure for e-commerce in Europe.
- The IOTA Tangle is used to create a fixed, decentralized audit trail infrastructure.
As the IOTA Foundation announced, it has been awarded another European Union project. Together with a consortium of 22 other organizations, the IOTA Foundation was awarded a project to build a secure infrastructure that will support the growth of small businesses and retailers in the e-commerce sector from Europe. For this purpose, the IOTA Foundation together with companies and institutions such as INOV, Sonae, Caixa Bank, Atos, Search Lab, Fraunhofer IF, Engineering and Telematix formed the ENSURESEC consortium, which won the competition from the European Commission in January 2020.
The project, which started with a first online meeting earlier this month, will receive a budget of 7.7 million euros from the EU budget to develop an end-to-end security solution for the e-commerce and delivery services ecosystem of the digital European single market. The total cost of the project is currently estimated at 9.3 million Euros. The aim of the project is to provide a prevention tool that uses machine learning to classify, predict, detect and respond to cyberattacks.
The role of the IOTA Foundation within the project
The project is coordinated by the INOV research centre from Portugal, and the technical management of the project is carried out by the CEA (Centre for L’energie Atomique) from France. The IOTA Foundation is the sole provider of the Distributed Ledger technology and will receive a budget of 450.000 EUR to provide the IOTA Tangle technology and expertise to build a fixed, decentralized audit trail infrastructure.
To this end, the IOTA Foundation will develop a set of interfaces for IOTA streams, as well as a set of off-tangle components that allow for the search and verification of data on the tangle. ENSURESEC will also use the IOTA Identity solution to ensure the authenticity of the information. Thus, the tangle should help to make the solution secure against cyberattacks:
The Tangle is cybersecure. The permissionless nature makes it harder to aggregate enough node power required to control the ledger state. Differently from permissioned solutions, the Tangle does not relax security toward nodes onboarding. The use of Proof-of-Work as spam protection makes it difficult to perform Denial of Service attacks, thus guaranteeing 24/7 infrastructure availability, and allows to guard against possible ledger forging attacks by third parties. IOTA transactions signature is quantum-secure and protected against brute force tampering attacks.
As the IOTA Foundation also notes, the scalability of the IOTA Tangle after the upgrade to Coordicide will allow the developed solution to adapt to an ecosystem of parties that can grow indefinitely to meet the expected transaction volume in the ecosystem of e-commerce services. In terms of security, there will be a number of attack scenarios that will be tested:
ENSURESEC technology will be deployed and tested in a number of different real-world e-commerce scenarios and under possible (cyber-)physical attack threats. In particular, the benefit of using IOTA, combined with G4S security tools, will be tested in the supply chain of TOFAR Market, a pharmacy e-commerce operator, operated by logistic providers Milsped Group and Relational Romania.
In addition, further scenarios and attack vectors will be analyzed during the course of the project and the further use of IOTA, in particular for the prevention of cyberattacks, will be investigated.
In the recent past, the Foundation has already won several tenders from the European Union to implement various projects. These include the +CityXchange project, which is developing a concept for the smart city of the future, and Dig_it, in which IOTA is participating, to help develop a digital solution for the supply chain in the mining sector.
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