Economic development and Science & Technology prospects

It is clear that the Internet and associated information technologies are going to be central to the fabric of society in the 21st century.

Like all technology it brings with it great benefits but also great dangers. As society becomes increasingly reliant on such technologies for commerce, communications and infrastructure generally so their vulnerabilities to malicious and accidental faults will become increasingly critical.

Alongside this is the issue of confidence. If we are to reap the benefits of such technologies and services it is essential that sufficient confidence in their dependability and security be established. It is thus essential that we have the tools and techniques to design dependable and secure Internet architectures to provide these services. Furthermore it is essential that we have effective means to assess the robustness of such designs in the face of hostile and malicious attack.

MAFTIA seeks to develop these design and evaluation technologies along with appropriate mechanisms, architectures and protocols. The technical approach proposed builds on proven techniques and expertise shared by the consortium partners regarding, for example, the design and evaluation of security protocols, fault-tolerant architectures etc. These will be tested against a number of case studies. This will serve to establish where enhancements are required and demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.

The results of this project will be to provide highly assured mechanisms, protocols and architectures that will help in the deployment of Internet services in Europe. Alongside this will be tools and techniques specifically tailored for the design and evaluation of Internet applications. In order to ensure that those benefits are realised, we need to foster their deployment. This can be achieved in two distinct ways, namely dissemination and exploitation.