UC - The University of Coimbra

The University of Coimbra (UC) is a prestigious European Research Higher Education Institution. With around 20000 students, UC is one of the largest Universities in Portugal. The Systems and Software Engineering Group (SSE) has been active since 1989 and is part of the Centre for Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra (CISUC). The group expertise includes dependability and security aspects, software development methodologies and languages, and big data processing. The group has a longstanding collaboration with Brazilian universities and institutions namely UNICAMP, USP, UFAL and INPE. In fact, there is a history of collaboration in exchange of researchers and students, and also of projects such as "Benchmarking da Confiança no Funcionamento de Componentes de Software" (2006), Menon@WS project (2011-2012), the REVVIS project (2008), which involved various Ibero-american institutions, and currently the projects DEVASSES and EUBrasilCloudFORUM. Since 2006 the group has been working with software security particularly with secure systems and security assurances by means of experimental security modeling, evaluation and benchmarking. This includes the development of new vulnerability detection techniques based on testing, monitoring, and analysis. Moreover, the group has been pioneer, in the recent years, in techniques for vulnerability and attack injection designed to uncover security vulnerabilities and evaluate protection systems. This knowledge has been applied in several domains, ranging from web applications and services to safety critical systems. The group is also not new to the security in cloud computing infrastructures both in terms of projects and collaborations. In fact, the UC is partner in one initiative aims at developing benchmarks for IDS solutions for cloud infrastructures. UC is the European coordinator for activities on security provisioning and assurances, addressing the privacy of massive data and the assessment of security, as well as a common AAA (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting) framework. Additionally, UC will contribute to the dissemination and outreach activities, to the QoS monitoring, to the security and privacy support for data analytics and QoS and monitoring metrics extensions, and to the integration and interoperability task. In practice, UC researchers will bring to the project their experience on designing secure systems, in particular from the perspective of security assessment and benchmarking, and on deploying dependable, interoperable, and secure cloud-based services and systems.