BIECO (Building Trust in Ecosystems and Ecosystem Components)
CONTEXT AND CHALLENGE
Modern digital systems increasingly take the form of ecosystems that combine software components, services, devices, and supply-chain dependencies. In such environments, a single vulnerable or compromised component can affect the integrity and operation of the entire system.
Traditional cybersecurity approaches are often designed to protect individual components or apply static security checks at specific points in time. These methods struggle to cope with ecosystems that evolve continuously, span organisational boundaries, and combine heterogeneous technologies. As a result, vulnerabilities can remain undetected until failures propagate across systems.
BIECO addresses this challenge by shifting the focus from protecting isolated elements to building and maintaining trust at the ecosystem level, using continuous, evidence-based assessment of behaviour, integrity, and interaction across components.
Project objective
The objective of the BIECO project was to develop a comprehensive framework for establishing, evaluating, and maintaining trust in digital ecosystems.
The project aimed to enable ecosystems to assess their own trustworthiness continuously by combining behavioural monitoring, vulnerability analysis, simulation, and cross-layer evidence, allowing anomalies and weaknesses to be detected early and addressed before they escalate into system-wide incidents.
Scope and approach
BIECO was implemented as a Horizon 2020 research and innovation project running from 2020 to 2023, delivered by a European consortium of research institutions and industry partners.
The project focused on building an integrated trust-management environment that evaluates ecosystems holistically rather than treating components in isolation. Instead of relying on static security assumptions, BIECO introduces mechanisms that adapt as systems evolve, enabling trust to be reassessed continuously throughout operation.
Within the consortium, 7bulls.com contributed engineering expertise to the development and integration of software components supporting BIECO’s trust-management framework, helping translate research concepts into deployable solutions.
Industrial Research
Technical focus
The BIECO framework integrates multiple technical mechanisms to assess and maintain trust across digital ecosystems:
- Continuous behavioural monitoring to detect deviations and early signs of compromise
- Automated vulnerability assessment across heterogeneous software and system components
- Simulation tools to analyse how failures or attacks could propagate within interconnected ecosystems
- Cross-layer analysis correlating evidence from software, services, and hardware interactions
- Trustworthiness metrics that are updated dynamically as the ecosystem changes
Together, these capabilities enable ecosystems to analyse their own behaviour, identify emerging risks, and support informed responses based on verifiable evidence.
Experimental Development
Application domains
BIECO is applicable to domains where interconnected systems must operate securely and reliably, including:
- Industrial automation
- Mobility and automotive systems
- Large-scale digital and IoT ecosystems
Target users
BIECO is designed for organisations involved in the design, operation, and governance of complex digital ecosystems, including:
- operators of interconnected industrial and cyber-physical systems
- organisations managing multi-vendor or supply-chain-dependent digital infrastructures
- teams responsible for security, resilience, and trust management across distributed systems
Results and impact
Results and expected outcomes
The BIECO project delivers a trust-management framework that enables digital ecosystems to continuously evaluate and demonstrate their trustworthiness.
By combining behavioural analysis, vulnerability detection, simulation, and cross-layer evidence, the project shows how ecosystems can detect anomalies early, limit the propagation of failures, and maintain operational integrity as systems evolve.
The resulting approach supports more resilient and transparent digital ecosystems, where trust is not assumed but continuously verified through observable behaviour and evidence-based assessment.
BIECO was delivered by a European consortium including:
UNINOVA – Instituto de Desenvo
lvimento de Novas Tecnologias
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
GradiantUniversity of Murcia
ResiltechHolisun
TTTech Auto
I-FEV
7bulls.com
Curious about how we can DELIVER in your project?
The BIECO project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Grant Agreement No 952702
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