Facing ethics and security issues
What is the ethics for a research project such as IRIS? How many ethics and security challenges can be counted in a research project? How to handle them properly, without impacting the project development time and objectives?
Those are the ethics and security dilemmas a research project consortium is supposed to solve since its early stage. Especially when you come to a security project, processing personal, sensitive and classified data.
IRIS is facing all those ethics and security challenges through the close collaboration of the whole consortium, including technology developers as well as ethics and security experts.
Supported by an Ethics Board directed by the Ethics Manager from partner CyberEthics Lab., as well as by a Security Board, IRIS applies risk management strategies, delivers guidelines, defines ethics and security requirements for the software platform development, applies legal protocols, creates awareness inside and outside the project on how to grant individual fundamental rights both during the research process and the software platform development.
Synergies with other security projects have been established too. Especially in this last period, IRIS participated to an event promoted by the sister European research project PHOENIX entitled “Privacy, Ethics and Cybersecurity aspects in critical infrastructures” held by CyberEthics Lab. in Rome on the 7th of July, to share thoughts and knowledge about cyber and privacy threats impacting critical infrastructures and individual fundamental rights.
IRIS, and specifically its collaborative CERT/CSIRT platform, was presented by partner Netcompany – Intrasoft, while one of the IRIS Ethics Board members, Prof. Teresa Numerico from the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, participated to the round table organised to debate and gather feedback on the proposed holistic approach to tackle cyberthreats, where cybersecurity concerns are analysed from the privacy and ethics perspectives as well.
New ethics challenges will be faced during the IRIS project, including — inter alia — the human factors impact on the development of the software platform, which final results will be reported in the future steps of the project (August 2023).
