SEPIA · Secure, Embedded Platform with advanced Process Isolation and Anonymity Capabilities

Mobile and embedded devices are rapidly evolving into powerful, ubiquitous personal assistants. As such, they will be involved in security-critical operations like authentication, payment, e-Banking and e-Government applications. Nevertheless, they have to be open platforms on which entertainment applications need to find their place. Being part of the Internet of Things, these platforms become an interesting target to attack and efficient security mechanisms are required to increase people's and companies trust in them. The SEPIA project addresses these challenges and considers trustworthiness,security and protection capabilities of such devices as key enablers for new businesses and the integration of mobile platforms in the eEurope initiative.Establishing trust requires assessments from independent organisations. However,existing evaluation methodologies do not keep pace with the rapidly evolving mobile and embedded market.SEPIA will therefore focus on three topics: Security enhancements of mobile platforms,cryptography and privacy protecting technologies, delta-evaluation and certification methodologies. A major objective of SEPIA is to define a next-generation security-architecture for mobile and embedded systems, addressing topics such as isolated execution space, virtualization as well as secure protection of confidential data. Moreover, privacy protecting mechanisms based on strong cryptography and time- and cost efficient certification processes reducing the time from design to market will be researched in the project. In SEPIA, establishing trustworthiness is seen as an asset that is considered right from the design phase rather than being addressed as add-on feature.SEPIA will include theoretical and practical research as well as the development of proof-of-concept prototypes. All these efforts will result in the SEPIA reference platform which will be disseminated via demonstrators and as an open platform for further research and product development.