Blue Book: A set of cybersecurity roadmaps and challenges for researchers and policymakers

After the completion of its third year of operation in 2022, the CyberSec4Europe1 pilot project (https://cybersec4europe.eu/) produced this ”Blue Book” (and delivered it as Deliverable D4.7) to serve as a Horizon Research Roadmap in the area of cyber security. To make this book a reality, the project put together a ”Task Force” of young and senior researchers in the area of cyber security. The Task Force proposed an initial set of topics and referred back to its constituency, which is composed of top cyber security researchers, asking them what the important research problems should be in relation to these topics. The result of this consultation was a description of each topic that contained the following aspects:

• What is the topic? Describe the topic and how it interacts with cyber security.
• Who is going to be affected by cyberattacks in this area? Ordinary people? organisations? the government? who?
• What is expected to happen if we are subjected to such cyberattacks? financial loss? loss of productivity? loss of life? what?
• What is the worst thing that can happen if things go really wrong? massive loss of life? a war? financial losses in the range of billions of euros? what?
• What are the main research gaps? What do we need to do from a research point of view in order to deal with this problem? What are the important research questions that need to be addressed?

• Example problems. Provide specific research problems that can be addressed in a single PhD thesis or in a small number of theses

After this consultation, the task force also asked the experts what the Grand Challenges in cyber security should be. These whould be topics that would need hundreds of people and several years to solve. However, if solved, they would fundamentally change the problem of cyber security.

We hope that this book will provide useful direction to researchers, will give good advice to policy makers and will prove useful to all who read it.

How to Read this Book

Policy makers may want to focus on Chapter 1 (page 1) which provides a short Executive Summary of the book, and on Chapter 16 (page 111) which describes Grand Challenge Research Problems in the area, which can be solved only with the collaboration of several research organisations and the support of leading funding agencies.

Young researchers who are interested in doing a Ph.D. in systems security should read at least the final section of each chapter, which describes problems that are appropriate to be solved within the context of a Ph.D. thesis.

Experienced researchers may want to read all chapters but especially Chapter 16 (page 111), which describes Grand Challenge Research Problems in the area.