The Trustless Dual-Use initiative gets traction

After 3 years of hard work, by our team, advisors and partners at the Trustless Computing Association, and several speakers of the Free and Safe in Cyberspace event series, our Trustless Dual-Use project is getting substantial traction from public and private partners, especially from the Italian MoD which was lacking till very recently.

ABSTRACT

The Trustless Dual-Use is an initiative, lead by our Trustless Computing Association, to aggregate public and private partners – current and prospective (see doc link below) – to submit, over the next 12 months, a set of €15-25M+ 2-stage EU/national public co-funding proposals to create a European dual-use IT platform, ecosystem and certification schema, that aim to radically exceed the civilian and military state of the art in IT security, initially for confidentiality-critical and integrity-critical scenarios.

FUNDING

Such proposals will be submitted to European Defence Industrial Development Plan (EDIDP), just approved this week by the EU Parliament, and EDA Cat-B, ECSEL-JU, H2020 a and national funding programs and private co-funding. EDIDP requires the participation of at least 3 EU MoDs and SMEs.

PARTNERS & PROSPECTS

In addition to our longtime public and private partners, we have received much and mounting interest so far by Ministries of Defence and Security Agencies of Italy, Germany, and Austria. In addition, we have been engaging with private partners: major banks, defense contractors, national posts or “digital agencies” in Italy, Germany and Austria: including BVtech, Leonardo, R&D Cybersecurity and Secunet, Poste Italiane, Post Luxembourg. We are open to extension to other EU nations, such as Luxembourg, France or Switzerland.

RECENT MOUNTING TRACTION WITH ITALY MoD

The new Undersecretary of the Ministry of Defense of Italy, Angelo Tofalo – with delegation to cybersecurity and military intelligence – invited us as Trustless Computing Association to a meeting on this July 23rd. There are only 2 Defense Undersecretaries which act as sort of “deputy minister”. In its invitation, on CC, there was the new Minister of Defense Elisabetta Trenta, and the M5S “shadow Minister of Interior”, Paola Giannetakis, both of which had agreed to join our event in Berlin on May 4th, albeit had to cancel for delays in Italian government formation process.

Next July 16-17th, we’ll be meeting the General Brig. Pisciotta Head of General Planning of SMD III Department for Military Politics and Planning of the Italian Ministry of Defense, which has expressed “absolute interest” in our initiative, and extended invitation to SMD VI (cyber systems procurement), Italian MoD Cyber Command (CIOC) and Segredifesa (R&D).

DOCUMENTSA live draft 60-pager draft Trustless Dual-Use Framework Proposal can be found here in PDF or Gdoc.  I invite you to review especially:

  • Section 1: 3-pager Summary

  • Section 6: Current and prospective public and private partners.

    • Section 6.4: Most recent engagement with EU MoDs

Rufo Guerreschi