Assistant Professor Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, Affiliated Researcher at ICS-FORTH, ERC Starting Grant holder, was awarded an ERC Proof of Concept grant during the last round of the application process for the PHILOS project. The ERC Proof of Concept Grants aim to maximise the value of the excellent research already supported by ERC, by funding further work (i.e. activities which were not scheduled to be funded by the original ERC frontier research grant) in order to explorethe innovation potential of the ideas arising from these projects. Proof of Concept Grants are therefore on offer only to Principal Investigators whose proposals draw substantially on their ERC funded research.

PHILOS (Prefix HIjacking Live detectiOn System) is a defense approach against a class of cyberattacks, called BGP prefix hijacking, targeting computer networks. PHILOS is: (a) based on accurate and fast detection of attacks, leveraging the recent shift towards real-time streaming BGP monitoring services, thus (b) enabling flexible and fast mitigation of hijacking events. Compared to existing approaches/tools, PHILOS combines characteristics desirable to network operators such as accuracy, speed, privacy, and flexibility. With the PHILOS approach, BGP prefix hijacking can be neutralized within a minute, i.e. orders of magnitude faster than today’s norm.

Prof. Dimitropoulos has been leading the research team INSPIRE, which works on topics around Internet measurements, software defined networks and network monitoring systems. More information can be found here: www.inspire.edu.gr