Recherche

As part of Thales's new research facility at the École Polytechnique campus in Palaiseau, near Paris, Thales has created ThereSIS, a research laboratory dedicated to developing security technologies to protect people, property and critical information systems.
"ThereSIS, which stands for Thales European Research centre for Security & Information Systems, is an applied research laboratory dedicated to developing global security technologies in order to hone Thales's technological edge and strengthen its position as a key provider of security solutions and services," explains Jean-Luc Zolesio, Director of Research and Innovation.
The centre's main areas of focus are information system security and security solutions for property and people, two areas which can of course overlap.

The critical nature of information system security
By playing a major role in the French government's efforts to modernise the administration, including the tax portal and electronic medical record system, Thales has acquired unrivalled experience, making it one of Europe's foremost providers of e-government solutions. ThereSIS aims to consolidate and expand this capacity to manage complex electronic systems used by millions of citizens.
"Our primary mission is to give Thales a technological lead in complex web-based systems. This strategy also underpins Thales's commitment to the European NESSI platform (see below), which is chaired by Thales, to develop and promote future open software and service-oriented architectures (SOA) based on open-source software," explains ThereSIS Director Serge Druais.
ThereSIS is a logical extension of the NESSI initiative and will be one of the platform's pilot laboratories. The lab will pursue a proactive partnership policy in order to rapidly generate results and meet market demand. ThereSIS will demonstrate its ability to innovate through practical demonstrations and product, services and solutions prototyping.

Five key research areas
ThereSIS is channelling its efforts into a number of key areas, including architectures for web-based services (SOA, Peer2Peer, Grid, ICT convergence, etc.), information system security (Information Assurance) and resilience (i.e., the ability to withstand attacks), and open-source software and open standards, which are critical to system interoperability.
"Our fourth main focus," Serge Druais continues, "is using modelling and simulation techniques for information system security. With rapid prototyping and software re-use, these technologies should enable us to reduce project development costs by between 30 and 40%."
To cover the full spectrum of emerging needs for complex web systems, the lab is also starting work on end-to-end supervision and administration for extensive, distributed architectures, semantic enhancement of web services and new internet uses.

The challenges of protecting people and property
An ever-growing number of increasingly complex infrastructures, terrorist-related risks and natural catastrophes have spurred the need for proactive global security systems, which not only detect but also anticipate incidents.
"This means, for example, detecting precursory events, such as abnormal behaviour and strings of events that significantly increase the level of risk, and then triggering the appropriate safety measures. The goal is of course to avoid or at least minimise the impact of an incident," says Jean-Luc Zolesio.
Another challenge is to increase the efficiency of crisis management systems by making them more predictive, thereby avoiding the "domino effect", and by making them more comprehensive and interoperable. The watchword for all these systems is modularity. This ensures that they can be integrated seamlessly into legacy systems and deployed progressively according to the customer's requirements and investment targets.

Dedicated resources
ThereSIS came on stream in September 2006 with a team of twenty critical information system security experts. In 2007, it will incorporate a physical security unit, which should expand the team to about 45 people by the end of the year. Combined with our steady network of industrial partners, these resources are a major strength in our efforts to spearhead technological innovation to support the Thales strategy on security markets.

NESSI, a major European project
NESSI (Networked European Software & Services Initiative) is a European technology platform which brings together 22 industrial companies, SMEs and university institutes operating in the software, telecommunications and IT services sector who have chosen to pool their research efforts on a range of specific topics including service-oriented architectures, web semantics, grid computing software and infrastructure, and security.
The platform, which is chaired by Thales, pursues an ambitious programme aimed at developing and promoting future open software and services architectures (SOA) based on open-source software for enterprises, administrations and citizens.