History

Founded in 2020, based in Italy, V-Research is a private R&D Lab that bridges foundational challenges and engineering needs (currently in the field of cybersecurity). It was born from the idea of creating a place where people and culture could really come first, where one can express her ideas in whatever forms she prefers. We are not just saying it! We mean it! Read more

History of V-Research

It requires an incredible amount of work to dig deeper into one's ideas and magnify all the beautiful details. But time is unreal and in research activities we are not just dealing with timeA, but mainly with timeB (right Kripke?). We first rented a small office in Verona but it was too calm, too silent. Great for research but not for creativity and discussions. Luckily, we met Susanna & Antonello who created 311Verona, a vibrant environment made of values, books, students, and companies. They built it with love and passion, the perfect home for v-research.

Mission

Our mission is to develop a scientific theory of cybersecurity and a toolchain for the secure engineering of cyber-physical systems. Cybersecurity is still a relatively new research field and lacks of foundational understanding to make current products suitable for the engineering of secure systems. We now live in a world where (pen)testing is the main weapon against cybersecurity attacks. But, if there is no cybersecurity theory, what are we testing? Read more

Mission of V-Research

We believe a more scientific approach will stem from a secure-by-design approach and this is how we work. This is our educated guess but "there is no royal road to science" so, any idea or criticism is welcome. We have many publications on cybersecurity in international conferences, we have patents in the field of cybersecurity, and an extensive network of researchers both in academia and industry. We welcome new unsolved challenges in the field of cybersecurity. Our openness allow us to freely collaborate on foundational problems such as the definition of a cybersecurity scientific theory; a tough journey at the very edge of cybersecurity science and engineering.

Research Challenge

Our challenge consists in engineering a 100% secure Cyber-Physical System, or else a system where there are zero possible successful attacks. The challenge is bold and ambitious but we believe that a scientific approach should aim at something precise and rigorous. There is no more-or-less in science, either you have a theory that precisely predicts some phenomenon or you keep searching for that theory. Read more

The Purple Challenge

We have developed a mathematical scientific theory for cybersecurity and a formal risk assessment methodology (and associated toolchain) built on it. Our first results show that our process is capable of identifying all the possible weaknesses of any given design and, based on them, we can then extract the correct security requirements to mitigate those weaknesses. The formal approach based on our theory dramatically elevates the quality of the system engineering process. Our theoretical results and prototypes are freely available on GitHub. We are currently working on establishing a relation between the weaknesses (and therefore potential attacks) predicted by our risk assessment prototype and the attacks identified by the Dolev-Yao Intruder model on the same system. We aim to demonstrate that all the attacks are based on weaknesses we found :) or that we are wrong :(