Semantics, Cybersecurity & Services (SCS)

Digitalization brings many new opportunities for businesses and governments by fostering the development of innovative online services. However, this development also brings new challenges, notably in terms of intelligence, interoperability, security and privacy. The mission of the SCS group is to advance the development of innovative online services with improved quality through context-alignment and with reduced security and privacy threats.

We work on methods and techniques for requirements conceptualization, architecture design, and model-driven engineering of service systems. We focus on data-driven services that are able to make sense of their context and can reliably and timely react on changing situations. We develop service ontologies and service composition frameworks to realize semantic interoperability and meaningful enterprise services. To protect these services against cyberattacks, we develop algorithms and protocols that provably secure (within dedicated attacker models) the underlying IT infrastructure and that are able to thwart or detect attacks. For services that collect and process sensitive data, we build privacy-enhancing technologies and design data protection and anonymization techniques to avoid or reduce data theft and privacy violations.

We apply and validate our results in various domains where data driven innovation plays an important role (healthcare, logistics, emergency management, smart cities), and where smart, secure and privacy-aware services are vital to society.