Cybersecurity Research: Challenges and Course of Action

The European society faces numerous disruptive changes due to the progressing digitalisation. These changes have the potential to lead to a fair digitalised world if they are based on the ideal of digital sovereignty as a guiding principle at the citizen, economic and state levels. Research in cybersecurity creates the technological prerequisites for addressing the challenges of digitalisation in this spirit. Researchers in academia and industry from all over Europe met in Darmstadt and Berlin to identify the main challenges of cybersecurity research. Irrespective of their scientific backgrounds, all authors agreed that effective security and privacy measures require a systematic and holistic approach which considers security and privacy from the ground up. They stressed that in addition to the proposed research agenda, it is necessary to improve education across the board. During the discussions, it became also clear that various important scientific questions remain open, and that only long-term research across all disciplines can solve these problems. In the first chapter, we outline the major challenges in the fundamental research of the IT security fields in computer and engineering sciences. In the second chapter, we look at the cybersecurity challenges from the perspective of economic, legal and social sciences. In the last chapter, we analyse various examples of applications and technologies which combine the different research areas. Each section of the roadmap is dedicated to a specific challenge. The order of the sections is not intended to reflect their rel ative importance. For each challenge, we propose concrete next steps based on the state of the art in the scientific and industrial research landscape. We hope to reach out to all interested parties who endeavour to strengthen cybersecurity and enhance digital sovereignty in Europe.