Final Workshop
Held at Newcastle University, 18-19 February, 2003.

Deliverables
All the MAFTIA deliverables in one place.

Publications
A list of MAFTIA-related papers published by members of the project.

MAFTIA: The Benefits

MAFTIA brought together the talents and expertise of European groups who are world leaders in their respective specialities (fault tolerance, dependability, security, distributed systems, cryptography, intrusion detection, formal methods). The combination of these complementary capabilities gave rise to a truly powerful synergy that was built on mutual respect, and ensured that the project consortium covered the full range of tools and techniques needed to tackle the challenges of securing Internet applications.

Most importantly, MAFTIA brought together expertise in the areas of security on the one hand and dependability and fault-tolerance on the other. Until now these two communities have been largely disjoint and even somewhat hostile. Such a combination and synergy of talent would simply not have been possible at the national level.

The benefits of working with partners outside Europe

The MAFTIA conceptual model was based on the core dependability concepts developed over many years as an international collaboration within IFIP WG 10.4, and MAFTIA results were presented and discussed at several WG 10.4 meetings. MAFTIA played a leading role in a number of high-level EU/US workshops in the broad area of intrusion tolerance and survivability, and is regarded as a world leader in the field by the US DARPA community, whose research directions it has influenced. A senior MAFTIA researcher became a consultant to a DARPA project, and participated in DARPA workshops, enabling a beneficial interchange of ideas. Professor Roy Maxion of Carnegie Mellon University, a world expert in the field of intrusion detection, provided feedback as a member of MAFTIA's Industrial Advisory Board.

Who will benefit from the work?

The vision of an Information Society depends on the delivery of dependable services via an Ambient Intelligent network that will evolve from today's Internet. Users must be able to place justifiable trust in the services offered to them. Thus, it is critical to make such services dependable, and in particular resilient to malicious attacks perpetrated by external hackers or by corrupt insiders. In particular, systems must not just detect and report such attacks, but should be able to tolerate such attacks and remain operational, without suffering lengthy periods of down-time while operators and managers investigate and try to repair the system.

MAFTIA has made significant strides towards the provision of a trustworthy infrastructure for the Information Society, and the technologies developed by MAFTIA are potentially beneficial to the companies who will be building that infrastructure. The creation of a trustworthy infrastructure will encourage and facilitate the uptake of
e-commerce, e-government, etc., thereby contributing to the quality of life of European citizens.

In particular, techniques developed by MAFTIA will find their way into the marketplace through products offered by industrial partners. IBM, for example, has a long history of producing reliable systems using advanced technology; results of MAFTIA are already available in IBM security services offerings and are likely to be incorporated into products that offer enhanced security for middleware and server systems such as file systems and data bases.

Thus, MAFTIA has made a significant contribution to achieving the goal of placing Europe at the forefront of the Knowledge Economy.