The ETSI Technical Committee on Cybersecurity (TC CYBER) unveiled ETSI EN 303 645, a standard for cybersecurity in the Internet of Things that establishes a security baseline for internet-connected consumer products and provides a basis for future IoT certification schemes. Based on the ETSI specification TS 103 645, EN 303 645 went through National Standards Organization comments and voting, engaging even more stakeholders in its development and ultimately strengthening the resulting standard. The EN is a result of collaboration and expertise from industry, academics and government.

ETSI EN 303 645 specifies 13 provisions for the security of Internet-connected consumer devices and their associated services. IoT products in scope include connected children’s toys and baby monitors, connected safety-relevant products such as smoke detectors and door locks, smart cameras, TVs and speakers, wearable health trackers, connected home automation and alarm systems, connected appliances (e.g. washing machines, fridges) and smart home assistants. The EN also includes 5 specific data protection provisions for consumer IoT.

Standardization is an important tool to complement national and European policies, because of its voluntary nature and its consensus-building approach between different economic players. CEN and CENELEC have been working for many years in collaboration with the Commission and other stakeholders to develop and adopt standards in support of numerous European initiatives and policies, including – but not limited to - sustainability. By providing new voluntary rules allowing, for example, the optimisation of the energy efficiency of products and systems, standards take an active part in the transition towards a greener economy.

The Green Deal is committed to using standardization in order to facilitate the transformation of our society. It is indeed what CEN and the CENELEC intend to contribute to in the years to come. The exchange of knowledge and good practices generated though the close links of CEN and CENELEC with their international counterparts, ISO and IEC, is a major asset for the development of standards in support of the Green Deal. This collaboration avoids the duplication of work and helps streamline and focus efforts in the areas where they are most appropriate. Furthermore, it allows to transition from a fragmented normative approach to a harmonised one.

ETSI unveiled a new white paper, written by the officials of the ETSI EP eHealth group, highlighting the role of standards developing organizations (SDOs) in developing standards for ICT to mitigate the impact of a pandemic. COVID-19 is not a mild pandemic, it is a serious, often lethal, health condition, the impact of which is seriously detrimental to social and economic life across the world. The ETSI paper acts to identify a "call to arms" to standards bodies and their constituent members to ensure that when the next pandemic arrives, we can rely on greater harmonization of the supply chain.

Standardization is an important tool to complement national and European policies, because of its voluntary nature and its consensus-building approach between different economic players. CEN and CENELEC have been working for many years in collaboration with the Commission and other stakeholders to develop and adopt standards in support of numerous European initiatives and policies, including – but not limited to - sustainability. By providing new voluntary rules allowing, for example, the optimisation of the energy efficiency of products and systems, standards take an active part in the transition towards a greener economy.

The Green Deal is committed to using standardization in order to facilitate the transformation of our society. It is indeed what CEN and the CENELEC intend to contribute to in the years to come. The exchange of knowledge and good practices generated though the close links of CEN and CENELEC with their international counterparts, ISO and IEC, is a major asset for the development of standards in support of the Green Deal. This collaboration avoids the duplication of work and helps streamline and focus efforts in the areas where they are most appropriate. Furthermore, it allows to transition from a fragmented normative approach to a harmonised one.

The ETSI virtual Security Week 2020, that took place from 8 June to 23 June, successfully closed with a record audience of more than 4000 viewers joining from over 50 countries. Speakers and moderators comprised a variety of stakeholders ranging from global telco operators, vendors and academia to security organizations and other standards bodies.

The 14 webinars focused four key topics around cybersecurity: how to deploy 5G securely in different market sectors, the Cybersecurity Act and the future European Standard developed by ETSI on security for IoT consumer devices, insights into the new Smart Secure Platform, as well as its requirements and impact on the ecosystem and advanced cryptography with quantum-safe cryptography, the technical evolution of the TETRA standard and fully homomorphic encryption.

Presentations displayed a good balance between high level and technical topics and the content provision and led to high interaction with very dynamic and challenging Q&A and panel sessions.

Please click here to access all recorded presentations. You can also download the PDF slide sets.

In the spring of 2020, the Strategic Advisory Body on Environment (SABE) will launch a new Joint Group on Circular Economy (JG-CE). The purpose of this Joint Group is to provide advice and coordinate CEN and CENELEC’s standardization activities related to the Circular Economy.

The transition towards a Circular Economy is widely considered as a necessary step to address the challenges related to the creation of a more sustainable economy. This will however require a transformation of our current ways of producing and consuming, collaborating and running businesses by closing the circle at the highest possible level (e.g. through repair or re-manufacturing), rather than exporting recyclable materials or applying thermal recovery. Standardization can help to provide a clear way to achieve these aims.

Standards already address a wide range of issues contributing to the transition, thanks to the work of a variety of technical committees (TCs). Both for the drafting of new standards and for the adjustment of existing standards, a coordinated approach will enable technical committees to develop standards concurrently while avoiding unnecessary duplications.

Engaging with Standards at the appropriate stages of research and innovation cycles is crucial to the development of new and evolved technologies. Identifying research topics for standardization at an early stage ensures that the requisite standards will be available to the industry when they are needed to support the relevant new technologies and products as they go to market.

Currently ETSI’s research and academic membership includes over 120 organizations, including public and private research institutes and universities from Europe and beyond. ETSI seeks to expand the existing research and academic community as well as reinforce the links with European research projects and platforms in order to build an active community of research and industrial partners, working towards a shared goal.

The sanitary crisis we are currently experiencing is a good example of where research results are essential to bringing new solutions and services to market in a timely manner. The world is looking for a vaccine against COVID-19, smartphone apps are being developed and deployed and the processing of massive amounts of medical and other logistical data is essential to mitigating the current and future pandemics.

To facilitate upcoming standards, the ETSI SmartM2M technical committee has released ETSI TR 103 546, a Technical Report on smart lifts, collecting and developing the type and range of data which should be exchanged between lifts and their relevant management applications. This study paves the way for technical requirements to monitor the activities and the performance of such lifts and describe their interaction with IoT devices and applications.

ETSI TR 103 546 specifies three categories of users and their role in the system: users of the lift with their needs, people and companies involved in this industry, such as manufacturers, suppliers or maintenance organizations and the owner or administrator of the buildings. Signals and controls are clearly identified, and a set of use cases highlights concrete and comprehensive examples of the usage and role of those signals and commands. The ETSI Technical Report outlines the complexity of the lift ecosystem, comprising both local and remote components which need to interact with one another as well as with external systems belonging to many different sectors. This leads to the conclusion that standards are key. Indeed, the whole system needs a full communication and interworking framework, able to reuse multiple communication technologies, to be interoperable, to integrate IoT devices and human interactions, and to provide semantic support and semantic interoperability.

10^th June, 2020 is an important day for the CEN and CENELEC Community: on this date in 1960, representatives from ISO and IEC members in the European Economic Community (EEC) and EFTA countries agreed to the creation of two European Standardization Organisations, CEN and CENEL – which then became CENELEC. In a period that saw the founding steps of European integration, this agreement of principle set the basis for the creation of a common European Standardization System.

In the decades since then, the European Standardization System has evolved, providing an invaluable contribution to the economic and social well-being of Europe and to the well-functioning of the Single Market. CEN and CENELEC’s cooperation has been a staple of this evolution, providing an effective platform for European standardization: the CEN and CENELEC Management Centre (CCMC), their common Secretariat in Brussels, stands today as a witness to their joint effort. CEN and CENELEC therefore celebrated 60 years of collaboration on European standardization. It is an opportunity for us to look back at the successes achieved, and to reflect on the road that is still ahead.