On 22 October 2026, representatives from five European cybersecurity research projects came together at the ETSI Security Conference 2026 in Sophia Antipolis, France, for an interactive panel entitled “Certifying the Future: A Live Research Debate on Security Certification”.
The panel brought together EMERALD, TELEMETRY, CUSTODES, COBALT and OSCRAT, all members of the European Cluster for Cybersecurity Certification (EC3), to exchange perspectives on the evolution of cybersecurity certification in an increasingly complex technological landscape.
Moderated by Björn Fanta (Fabasoft), with the participation of Christian Banse (Fraunhofer AISEC), Martin Gilje Jaatun (SINTEF) and Yiannis Koufos (Demokritos), the discussion addressed a central question: How should security certification evolve in the age of Artificial Intelligence?
Towards the Next Generation of Cybersecurity Certification
As digital infrastructures become increasingly interconnected and technologies such as Artificial Intelligence introduce new security challenges, traditional certification approaches face growing pressure to evolve.
The need for more efficient, adaptable and scalable certification processes has become particularly relevant in the context of cloud services, IoT ecosystems and other complex digital environments. At the same time, ensuring interoperability between different certification approaches and aligning technical developments with evolving regulatory and standardisation requirements remain important challenges.
Against this background, the ETSI panel provided an opportunity to bring together complementary research perspectives and examine how European innovation initiatives are addressing these challenges.
Rather than presenting individual project achievements in isolation, the discussion aimed to explore where current approaches converge, where they differ and what can be learned from their complementary experiences.
