NORCICS - Norwegian Center for Cybersecurity in Critical Sectors

Cybersecurity is not just a safeguard—it is a strategic enabler of digital transformation. It empowers business agility, enhances operational productivity, and fosters lasting customer trust. NORCICS envisions Norway as the world’s most securely digitalized nation. To realize this, it aims to strengthen the cybersecurity and resilience of digitalized critical sectors by driving research-based innovation. At the heart of NORCICS lies a mission to develop cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions tailored to the evolving needs of complex socio-technical cyber-physical systems in industry. These efforts directly support the strategic objectives outlined in Norway’s National Cybersecurity Strategy. NORCICS adopts a comprehensive, systemic methodology—addressing people, processes, and technologies across the six core cybersecurity functions: Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover. This integrated approach ensures robust protection for critical infrastructure. Research within NORCICS yields versatile methods and tools applicable across diverse industries. These innovations are rigorously tested through demonstrators spanning multiple critical sectors, ensuring real-world relevance and scalability. The NORCICS consortium brings together a diverse network of experts whose combined knowledge spans foundational research, sector-specific challenges, and technological applications. User partners from both public and private sectors represent all the critical sectors targeted by NORCICS. NORCICS collaborates with internationally renowned cybersecurity centers around the world, further elevating its international standing. It also cultivates a vibrant research environment by training over 18 PhD candidates and 7 postdoctoral researchers, equipping them with the skills to meet society’s cybersecurity needs.

The National Cybersecurity Strategy for Norway acknowledges the need to “address the (cybersecurity) challenges that will inevitably arise in conjunction with the rapid and far-reaching digitalization of Norwegian society”. Norway is one of the leading digital nations in the world. NORCICS’s vision is to contribute to making Norway the most securely digitalized country in the world, by improving the cyber security and resilience of its critical sectors, through supporting research-based innovation. NORCICS will follow a holistic, comprehensive and systemic approach addressing people, processes and technology to protect critical sectors throughout the cybersecurity core functions (identify, protect, detect, respond, recover). NORCICS adopts the Open Innovation Model, and the Technology Transfer model for joint industry-research groups research-based innovation, thus allowing its user partners to participate in shaping research and innovation roadmaps. Within NORCICS, the research is organized into three workpackages WP2 aims at improving our understanding of the cybersecurity-related issues in critical sectors; WP3 technologies aims at developing solutions for addressing these issues, whilst WP4 aims at validating and demonstrating these solutions in a number of critical sectors. Additionally, WP1 will maintain an innovation roadmap for all of NORCICS, WP2 is devoted to dissemination and knowledge transfer, and WP6 is the management workpackage. The consortium members have complementary expertise that collectively covers most of the areas of fundamental research, the sectorial domains and the technological applications of cybersecurity. The user partners come from both the public and the private sector and cover all the critical sectors addressed in NORCICS. Additionally, a number of internationally highly reputed centers active in the field of cybersecurity have confirmed their collaboration with NORCICS.