The SECURED project (SECURity at the network EDge)
Protection of mobile devices from Internet threats is usually achieved by installing appropriate tools (e.g. anti-virus, personal firewall, parental control) on each device. However, this poses several issues: it requires privileged access on the device, appropriate protection tools may not exist on all the platforms or their capabilities may vary greatly across the different devices, and tools may consume too many resources.
This results in ineffective or inconsistent protection for the users that will experience wide variation in security when using different devices and/or networks (for example, typically WiFi access inside a corporate network is protected by a border firewall while this is not the case for a 3G network).
The SECURED project proposes an innovative architecture to achieve protection from Internet threats by offloading execution of security applications into a programmable device at the edge of the network such as a home gateway or an enterprise router.