Lecture Description:

With the steady acceleration of digitalization, information technology has become an indispensable driver of societal well-being and is now omnipresent both at home and in the workplace. Digital sovereignty is a key factor for a successful digital transformation and plays a crucial role for Europe's competitiveness, especially in Industry 4.0, critical infrastructures, or GAIA-X and 5G. Not surprising that digital sovereignty gets high attention in politics, economy, research, and society. We are still a long way from digital sovereignty:

 • Strong dependency on external production and supply of technology
• Complex and inconsistent systems
• Sustainable IT security is not a decisive criterion for design and purchase of products

It is neither realistic, necessary nor desirable to have all elements of a digital infrastructure developed and produced by European manufacturers. However, a promising and goal-oriented strategy is to have European providers occupy selected thematic fields. Since 2018 Dr. André Kudra, CIO of esatus AG and board member of the IT Security Association Germany (TeleTrusT) focuses on Secure Platform as a concept for a secure, sustainable, and open IT platform. The focus is to find a way to reduce system complexity, abandon harmful design paradigms and put Security by Design into practice to strengthen information security. Related activities are driven via expert workgroups. Underlying technologies are FPGA, Application Specific Processors (ASP) and High-Level Synthesis (HLS). This presentation follows up on a talk in 2019 at the FPGA conference by outlining current work streams and technology projects. The focus will be on the technical design and components of Secure Platform as well as possible use cases.