by Ubitech,
The 2025 Work Programme released by the European Commission (EC) aims to reinforce the EU’s digital sovereignty and the enhancement of sustainable competitiveness of the EU’s industry. Within this context, EC gives emphasis on cybersecurity aspects of a rapidly evolving legal and technological environment, aiming to protect the human rights and safeguard privacy within the Digital Single Market Strategy.
To this end, the EU policymakers aim to achieve common harmonized rules and regulatory frameworks across EU for safeguarding internal and external digital security, improve preparedness and resilience in EU cyber space, while improving well-being, quality of life, prosperity and social fairness. More specifically, the new Work Programme (WP) focuses on core strategic aspects, structural measures and guidelines for the completeness of cybersecurity regulatory frameworks and legislation, digital networks consolidation through the Digital Networks Act, and fostering great opportunity offerings of AI and Quantum Computing. In addition, EC verifies the main strategic objectives toward the introduction of simplicity into the existing and upcoming EU regulations on technologies and cybersecurity and strengthens the resilience of its infrastructure and critical entities, within the modern global cyber ecosystem.
Cybersecurity represents a core aspect of the 2025 WP, since it touches holistically upon the core EU policies and the roadmap for a Digital Secure Europe. More specifically, it presents the main initiatives and the policy objectives related to cybersecurity. More analytically, the simplification of the Digital Package and the European Cyber Resilience Act which defines the cybersecurity requirements for HW/SW products and solutions aims to reduce significantly the existing regulatory burdens, reduce costs, and fostering competitiveness and simplify the cybersecurity compliance obligations, while assessing the cost-benefits impact, in the pathway of EU toward sustainable prosperity and competitiveness, with innovation as a catalyst.
Furthermore, the Digital Networks Act focuses on the modernization of the regulations on the interoperability of EU communication and digital infrastructures, setting new uniform standards for 5G/B5G solutions on the path to 2030 and boosting the research and standardization for 6G, while guaranteeing the security of the networks and data exchange.
In the innovation domain, EC also targets addressing proactively the challenges raised by emerging technologies, that are considered to have a major impact on the EU industry and societies, such as AI and Quantum technologies. In this direction, the AI Continent Action Plan and the Quantum Strategy of EU aim to expand the initial AI Act, while accelerating the R&I activities and access-to-market of advanced AI and Quantum Computing and Quantum Crypto edge-solutions in a holistic civil liability framework for protecting the well-being and fundamental rights of EU citizens and societies.
The REWIRE project has a special focus on the secure, reliable, traceable, and auditable mechanisms, to assure the secure and trusted operation of IoT devices, meeting the challenge of proving and attesting autonomous IoT devices’ safety throughout their entire lifecycle. Moreover, REWIRE solves the most prominent challenge on how to verify the trustworthiness of the upgraded service by making zero-trust assumptions (like in the context of the smart automotive use case) through continuous trust-aware authentication and authorization of connected devices for verifying the trustworthiness of transmitting devices. In the same context, enhancing the security of all deployed devices contributes to the vision of the EU towards cyber-secure societies which in turn can enable more services that can deliver a richer experience for end-to-end use cases, thus, enhancing user adoption. Furthermore, REWIRE’s trust assessment and operational assurance framework focuses on the explainability of trustworthiness models, to instill security-by-design features towards realizing trustworthy next-generation IoT services without breaching the privacy of the users. Unlike earlier methodological approaches and frameworks, REWIRE will not only guarantee cybersecurity and resilience to enable the long-term re-use that will improve the sustainability of our systems.