DETANGLE is an EU-funded project with a European initiative that aims to transform complex regulations and fragmented cybersecurity certification schemes into a single, intelligent and cohesive framework. Significant challenges persist in the effective implementation of EU cybersecurity Legislation and National Cybersecurity Strategies across Member States. These challenges arise from disparities in cybersecurity maturity, resources and legal interpretations between EU countries, resulting in inefficient cross-border collaboration and uneven levels of protection across the Union. Moreover, capacity gaps in National Cybersecurity Agencies limit their ability to supervise and enforce cybersecurity laws effectively, leading to delays in enforcement and oversight. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face substantial financial and operational burdens in complying with NIS2 and related obligations, increasing the risk of non-compliance. Compliance is further complicated by misalignment between public-sector cybersecurity mandates and private-sector priorities, and the resistance from businesses to adopt new security standards due to potential operational disruptions. These factors expand the EU’s cyber-attack surface, exposing critical infrastructure and creating weak links that undermine collective resilience. Furthermore, emerging technologies such as AI, IoT and quantum computing introduce new vulnerabilities due to unclear incident reporting thresholds and lack of trusted, secure mechanisms for cross-border data sharing. Finally, the fragmented adoption of cybersecurity certification schemes across Member States, combined with the confusion among vendors and consumers regarding the applicability and value, delays the uptake of secure technologies and results in inconsistent product security levels across the EU market.
To tackle these challenges, the mission of DETANGLE is to simplify the EU cybersecurity rules such as the NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) to enable organizations across Europe to collaborate securely and efficiently. The DETANGLE project will benefit governments, businesses and cybersecurity experts to (1) Detect and respond to cyber threats rapidly and intelligently, (2) Ensure compliance with evolving EU cybersecurity legislation, (3) Safely exchange threat intelligence across borders and (4) Ensure trust through transparency, certification and secure-by-design practices. DETANGLE will offer several tools to reduce fragmentation, empower national authorities with practical, ready-to-use infrastructures, support SMEs by lowering the cost and complexity of compliance and enhance EU-wide resilience through training, awareness and knowledge sharing. These tools will include an Integrated Incident Management Platform, NIS2 Compliance Tracker, Cybersecurity Collaboration Hub, Certification Support Framework and CRA Supervision & Enforcement Toolkit. At its core, DETANGLE represents clarity, trust and connection by untangling Europe’s cybersecurity ecosystem and EU regulatory and legislative compliance requirements into one unified and intelligent platform.
As a whole DETANGLE will (i) ensure that these services build on existing, mature solutions; (ii) deploy these offerings in an easy-to-use, efficient, and cost-effective manner, supported by trainings, documentation and events that will allow for thorough awareness raising and will ensure the offerings’ full exploitation potential towards a resilient EU; and (iii) make sure that these offerings are tailor-made to a variety of different stakeholders.
The project’s main objectives are as follows:
- Design, deploy and deliver an Integrated Incident Management Platform
- Facilitate compliance: the DETANGLE NIS2 Compliance Tracker
- Enable certification: The Cybersecurity Certification Support Framework
- Deliver an EU-wide Cybersecurity Collaboration Hub
- Deliver a DETANGLE CRA Supervision & Enforcement Toolkit
ITML’s role in the project
ITML is the project coordinator of the DETANGLE project. In this respect, ITML manages various aspects of the project, including technical management, quality assurance, risk management and stakeholder engagement. ITML also leads the task “Collaboration enabling mechanisms” which involves designing mechanisms to enable situational awareness, trustworthiness and resilience via threat intelligence sharing and collaborative crisis simulation tools. In addition, ITML leads the Pilot case ‘Collaborative incident management towards cross-border resilience and compliance optimization’ task which serves as a mean for the validation and evaluation of the DETANGLE EU-Wide Cybersecurity Collaboration Hub. Finally, ITML actively contributes to the dissemination, communication and exploitation efforts, ensuring the project’s visibility, impact and sustainability.
