Instituto de Telecomunicações (IT) is a Portuguese private, non-profit organization of public interest established in 1992, appointed as State Associate Laboratory by the Portuguese Ministry for Science and Technology since 2001.

IT's mission is to create and disseminate scientific knowledge in the field of telecommunications, networking and associated applications in order to both improve higher education and training, at graduate and postgraduate levels, and to improve the competitiveness of Portuguese industry. The Aveiro pole of IT currently has about 50 PhD researchers, many of which holding also teaching positions, plus 120 other researchers, with expertise on telecommunications (wireless and optical), and networks. Since its foundation IT has been involved in several projects in the area of wireless communications and associated applications, both at national and European level. Namely in the FP4-ACTS, FP5-IST, FP6-IST and FP7-ICT programmes (e.g. COGEU, C2POWER, WHERE2, GREENET, CODELANCE, ROMEO and SALUS, are some of the latest), Networks of Excellence, and also within other European initiatives, such as CELTIC, ENIAC-JU, ARTEMIS-JU, ITEA, CATRENE, and ECSEL-JU, in projects such as ARTEMOS, THINGS2DO, NewP@ss, BENEFIC and SWARMs, to name a few.

Since its foundation IT has been involved in several projects in the area of wireless communications and associated applications

Role

IT will provide a security framework for secure and authenticated data communication across the partners in the supply chain, in the scope of the SemI40 Task 1.3.1, which IT leads. Specifically, the security framework will provide mechanisms ensuring authentication and authorization of the entities in the supply chain environment as well as data authentication, integrity and confidentiality of the transmitted data. Furthermore, IT will design and implement a dedicated Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in the context of the supply chain environment that will enable the provided security mechanisms to achieve their full functionality.

Key contribution

IT’s main contribution in SemI40 project is the development of a security framework that will provide the following:

a) a suitable security mechanism that ensures authentication and authorization of users/applications requesting access to services, provided by the partners’ servers, as well as ensures data authentication, confidentiality and integrity of the data transmitted between the users/applications (e.g. web, mobile, native applications) and servers of the partners;

b) a suitable security mechanism providing authentication and authorization of the partners’ servers communicating with each other in the supply chain and exchanging data. In addition, this mechanism guarantees authenticity, confidentiality and integrity of the exchanged data between the servers.