The financial sector today faces several major challenges. Cyber threats and fraud has increased by more than 40% over the past 3 years causing deletion or manipulation of critical data, disruption of the system or illicit transactions. Long and complex contracting processes in banking and insurance cause increased costs of financial procedures. The blockchain industry is booming. The technology has a potential to dramatically reduce contracting costs. However, money laundering through manipulating blockchain-based cryptocurrency payment systems is the new form of world-wide financial crime. Mobile banking through IoT and mobile devices has become indispensable causing radical changes in how financial institutions have to operate.
A Consortium of 12 Partners led by the University of Reading (UK, represented by Professor Atta Badii, Computer Science Department) has just started the 3-year project Critical-Chains which addresses these major challenges. The project will develop a novel accountability model and an integrated framework for a cloud-based “x-as-a-service” solution stack that supports accountable, effective, accessible, fast, secure, and privacy-preserving financial contracts and transactions.
Work package leader DI Dr. Ralph Ankele and DI Christian Derler presented the planned contribution by the DIGITAL Competence Group Cyber Security and Defence to the project in the kick-off meeting held at the ICMA Centre, University of Reading (UK). The group will lead the requirements engineering, and contribute to security-privacy semantic modelling including formal verification methods; the framework architecture design and the research activities will focus on machine learning methods for anomaly detection to trigger context-aware alerting and blacklisting.
Links
Competence Group Cyber Security and Defence @ DIGITAL
ICMA Center for Financial Markets