Assistant Professor Xenofontas Dimitropoulos, ERC Starting Grant holder, was awarded with the ERC Proof of Concept grant during the last round of the application process for the PHILOS project. The ERC Proof of Concept Grants aim to maximise the value of the excellent research that the ERC funds, by funding further work (i.e. activities which were not scheduled to be funded by the original ERC frontier research grant) to verify the innovation potential of ideas arising from ERC funded projects. Proof of Concept Grants are therefore on offer only to Principal Investigators whose proposals draw substantially on their ERC funded research.

PHILOS (Prefix HIjacking Live detectiOn System) is a defense approach against a class of cyberattacks, called BGP prefix hijacking, targeting computer networks. PHILOS is: (a) based on accurate and fast detection of attacks, leveraging the recent shift towards real-time streaming BGP monitoring services, thus (b) enabling flexible and fast mitigation of hijacking events. Compared to existing approaches/tools, PHILOS combines characteristics desirable to network operators such as accuracy, speed, privacy, and flexibility. With the PHILOS approach, BGP prefix hijacking can be neutralized within a minute, i.e. orders of magnitudes faster than today’s norm.

Prof. Dimitropoulos has been leading the research team INSPIRE group, which works on topics around Internet measurements, software defined networks and network monitoring systems. More information can be found here: www.inspire.edu.gr