According to the EU State of Cybersecurity report by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), the number of cybersecurity-related incidents will increase by 24 percent by 2025, with ransomware and DoS/DDoS attacks being the most common. The emergence of new threats [1] and the consolidation of existing ones require doubling of efforts in proactive prevention and a decisive increase in research dedicated to cybersecurity. CyberNEMO (End-to-end Cybersecurity to NEMO meta-OS) project emerges as an evolution of the NEMO (Next Generation Meta Operating System) platform, designed to provide a secure, trustworthy, and robust execution environment across the IoT-Edge-Cloud computing continuum. Leveraging NEMO modular meta-operating system (mOS) framework, CyberNEMO introduces advanced cybersecurity and privacy-preserving mechanisms, emphasizing Zero Trust principles. This paper presents the CyberNEMO architecture, details its core innovative technologies, and describes its validation strategy through diverse living labs-including Smart Energy, Smart Water, Smart Manufacturing, Healthcare, Multimedia Distribution, and Smart Farming scenarios-demonstrating end-to-end cybersecurity and real-time threat mitigation capabilities, aligned with Europe's strategic cybersecurity goals.

The path to the Digital Decade in Europe is realized by various governance and regulatory frameworks that aim to materialize this core European strategy. The EU cybersecurity strategy projects to safeguard this path and enable a swift but smooth transition. Arguably, EU is constantly taking actions to address cybersecurity challenges and promote cyber resilience, focusing primarily in critical sectors such as energy. This imposes significant challenges for the cybersecurity technology providers and requires a flexible, adaptive and agile design and development approach. The presented work is an evolution of the ARES2021 paper “Pan-European Cybersecurity Incidents Information Sharing Platform to support NIS Directive” that further aligns with advancements in the European Cybersecurity policy and regulations landscape. This is feasible since the development of the Incidents Information Sharing Platform (I2SP) is agile, adaptive and has continuously been driven by the advancements observed and imposed by the European cybersecurity regulatory framework. The current work showcases the I2SP design enhancements to address the latest EU cybersecurity regulatory framework updates relating to the Network Code on Cybersecurity (NCCS), NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act, highlighting the stringent alignment between I2SP and the EU cybersecurity strategy.

The energy sector has been, in recent years, the target of sophisticated cyberattacks. Although the importance of collaborative cyber-security consciousness, expressed as extensive cyber threat intelligence sharing, is undoubted, the standardization of the means of exchanging cyber threat information efficiently and securely has been inadequately addressed and is mostly expressed by the emergence of the Trusted Automated eXchange of Indicator Information (TAXIITM) protocol which faces major deficiencies when it comes to data integrity assurance and suitability for event-driven architectures. This paper presents a novel approach enabling secure and real-time exchange of cyber threat information, by extending the technological capacity of the TAXII framework and addressing its deficiencies through the integration of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) and a generalized publish-subscribe middleware. The applicability of the proposed solution has been validated in several use cases addressing the real needs of Electrical Power and Energy Systems.

Cybersecurity in the Energy sector and relevant information sharing is at the foremost of European strategy towards the digital decade targeted by the EC for the years to come. The proposed Pan-European Incidents Information Sharing Platform (I2SP) offers a cyber-shield armour to European Electrical Power and Energy Systems (EPES) enabling cooperative detection of large scale, cyber-human security and privacy incidents and attacks. Via Incidents Information Sharing Platform, early detection and appropriate mitigation, guarantees the continuity of operations and minimization of cascading effects in the infrastructure itself, the environment, the citizens and the end-users.The Incidents’ Information Sharing Platform (I2SP) constitutes the software package which enables secure Cyber-Threat Intelligence (CTI) information sharing among EPES participants, as well as with trusted nominated entities, such as Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISACs), Computer Security Incident Response Teams (CSIRTs) and Security Operations Centers (SOC). I2SP facilitates technical information sharing in view of a warning system and incident reporting across the EU, aligning with the pillars of the new Network Code on Cybersecurity.

The massive deployment of IoT devices, broadband and mission critical services are paving the way for 5G communication networks, which will enable massive capacity, zero delay, elasticity and optimal deployment, enhanced security, privacy by design and connectivity to billions of devices with less predictable traffic patterns. This paper targets a very important and demanding application the Preventive Maintenance as a Service in Critical Infrastructures and more precisely in the energy (electricity and gas) transmission and distribution network that combines the 5G technology with secure IoT and drones flight control. In more details, it addresses the 5G advances at the edge network and proposes a number of VNFs to support surveillance using swarms of drones.

A distributed game theoretic framework based on correlated strategies is proposed to maximize the lifetime of dense homogeneous multiservice wireless sensor networks (MS-WSNs), that support multiple services continually and ubiquitously over the WSN deployment. The MS-WSN operation is dealt with as a game played by the multimode nodes. A correlated strategies approach is proposed to lead the MS-WSN close to its theoretical optimal state with respect to the network lifetime. The computationally efficient correlated strategy proposed to implement service selection by the multimode WSN nodes is distributed, based solely on local information exchange. Indicative simulation results concerning the application of the proposed scheme on top of k-hop clustering reveal that the proposed correlated strategies based framework leads the MS-WSN operation close to its theoretical optimal at no significant exchange of overhead messages.

The increasing demand for highly sophisticated cloud services and the consequent worldwide increase in the number of data centers (DC), make the need for energy efficient operation of DCs more actual than ever. Additionally, in the context of smart city and smart grid integration, flexible DCs can play a key role toward acting as grid-stabilization factors. In this paper, a review of the available techniques toward energy-efficient DC operation is performed. The available techniques give rise to four axes of flexibility within a federated DC network. Next, the applicability of the flexible, energy-efficient DC operation is highlighted, by proposing a simple scheduling algorithm, applicable to legacy DC equipment, for effective host and re-arrangement of the DC computing load. The proposed algorithm can provide substantial energy savings during periods of low computing load and improved Quality of Service during periods of high computing load. Concluding, the paper focuses on the grid-stabilization aspects of a federated DC network and the interoperability with the energy network via an Electronic Energy Marketplace in the context of a Smart City.

A coalitional game theoretic scheme is proposed that aims at maximizing wireless sensor network lifetime under specified QoS. Employing a small number of nodes of increased computing power and lifetime called representatives , an adaptive clustering scheme is proposed where neighboring nodes form coalitions in order to increase energy efficiency at the cost of controllable data-accuracy reduction. The coalition formation is globally optimized by the representatives. The spatial correlation of the sensed phenomenon measurements is exploited to formulate a cooperation scheme that reduces drastically the number of node transmissions. The specifications regarding the accuracy of the collected data determine the extent of coalition formation. The efficiency and stability of the proposed coalitional scheme are studied through simulations.