The advent of 5G and beyond has brought increased performance networks, facilitating the deployment of services closer to the user. To meet performance requirements such services require specialized hardware, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). However, FPGAs are often deployed in unprotected environments, leaving the user’s applications vulnerable to multiple attacks. With the rise of quantum computing, which threatens the integrity of widely-used cryptographic algorithms, the need for a robust security infrastructure is even more crucial. In this paper we introduce a hybrid hardware-software solution utilizing remote attestation to securely configure FPGAs, while integrating Post-Quantum Cryptographic (PQC) algorithms for enhanced security. Additionally, to enable trustworthiness across the whole edge computing continuum, our solution integrates a blockchain infrastructure, ensuring the secure storage of any security evidence. We evaluate the proposed secure configuration process under different PQC algorithms in two FPGA families, showcasing only 2% overheard compared to the non PQC approach.

The proliferation of synthetic media generation technologies, such as generative AI, has led to a surge of media content generation and consumption. While this progress opens new opportunities, especially in creative industries, it also causes challenges, including piracy, fake media distribution, and concerns about trust and privacy. In the creative sector, media modifications are often part of the production pipelines and in many application domains, creators need or want to declare the type of modifications that were performed on the media asset. The cryptographically signed association of provenance information with the media asset itself provides a trust link between the owner or editor of a media asset and its consumers. The absence of such assertions may reveal the lack of trustworthiness in media assets or worse, the intention to hide the existence of manipulations. This paper describes the JPEG Trust framework (ISO/IEC 21617) that aims to establish trust in digital media creation, modification, annotation, distribution and consumption. The framework provides standardized protocols to extract indicators to assess trustworthiness, means to annotate media provenance, and securely link the assets and associated annotations together.

The surge of media consumption on the Internet reflects how individuals engage with information, entertainment and communication. In parallel, the advancement of generative AI tools facilitates the creation of abundant content that is nearly indistinguishable from authentic content. To address aspects of misinformation, focus is shifted towards the secure and immutable annotation of provenance information. Although such frameworks aim to establish trust in media consumption, they raise privacy concerns, as provenance data may conceal identifiable information for individuals and locations. Thus, users should be allowed to manage the level of privacy of the provenance information of a media asset. In previous work, we focused on ensuring privacy in individual provenance events pertaining to the lifecycle of an image. This paper extends the privacy techniques over well-known provenance frameworks to allow a user to protect not only specific assertions of a provenance event but even subsets of the provenance graph.

The electrical grid has significantly evolved over the years, thus creating a smart paradigm, which is well known as the smart electrical grid. However, this evolution creates critical cybersecurity risks due to the vulnerable nature of the industrial systems and the involvement of new technologies. Therefore, in this paper, the ELECTRON architecture is presented as an integrated platform to detect, mitigate and prevent potential cyberthreats timely. ELECTRON combines both cybersecurity and energy defence mechanisms in a collaborative way. The key aspects of ELECTRON are (a) dynamic risk assessment, (b) asset certification, (c) federated intrusion detection and correlation, (d) Software Defined Networking (SDN) mitigation, (e) proactive islanding and (f) cybersecurity training and certification.