Associate Professor Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, Affiliated Researcher to ICS-FORTH, ERC Starting Grant holder, and his team, the INSPIRE research group, were awarded their second ERC Proof of Concept grant for the RAVEN project. The ERC Proof of Concept Grants aim to maximize 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 explore the innovation potential of 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. It is worth noting that only 2 Greek Researchers were funded by this Programme, both members of FORTH.

In their previous work, Xenofontas Dimitropoulos and his team developed ARTEMIS, an advanced production-grade detection and mitigation tool that protects networks against a class of cyberattacks, called “BGP prefix hijacking attacks”. However, in practice, network operators cannot even measure how much exposed their networks are to hijacking attempts, as well as their potential impact. RAVEN (Routing Attack Vulnerability Evaluation for Networks) aims to address this need by building a Proof of Concept of a BGP hijacking vulnerability assessment service, employing real-world experimentation, accurate simulations and realistic emulations.

Prof. Dimitropoulos has been leading the research team INSPIRE group, which works on topics around Internet measurements, software-defined networks and network monitoring systems. The project team members are Vasileios Kotronis, Pavlos Sermpezis, Lefteris Manassakis, George Nomikos, Petroula Karagianni and Petros Gkigkis. More information can be found here: www.inspire.edu.gr