The ongoing evolution of the Internet continues to deepen its integration into physical spaces and devices that people interact with on a daily basis. This integration manifests in two distinct yet interconnected dimensions: (1) everyday life, with the proliferation of mobile devices, smart environments like connected vehicles and intelligent buildings, and (2) critical infrastructures, spanning civilian domains such as Industry 4.0 and military applications, including autonomous robots and drones used in defense operations or to secure sovereign digital spaces. This transformation is driven by the rapid maturation of connected technologies, advancements in telecommunications, and the rise of virtualization. In this context, there is an urgent need to provide users with a hybrid physical-digital environment that is secure, resilient, and above all, trustworthy.

Ensuring even a baseline level of security in this rapidly evolving ecosystem poses significant challenges, largely due to the following factors:

1. Scale and Complexity: Cyber-physical systems are growing in size, reaching unprecedented scales, and are composed of increasingly miniaturized elements with specific atomic functions, such as IoT devices or microservices deployed across virtualized infrastructures.
2. Openness and Exposure: Many of these systems operate in open environments, extending beyond managed or controlled networks. This openness introduces vulnerabilities, as not all participants or components can be presumed to be trustworthy.
3. Autonomy and Dynamic Behavior: Due to their complexity and the necessity to maintain continuous functionality in the face of unpredictable events, these systems are moving toward greater autonomy. Human oversight is no longer sufficient or practical for managing such dynamic environments, necessitating systems that can operate and adapt independently.

To address these challenges, the OCIF team aims to design, implement, and validate innovative approaches and tools that enable the self-governance and resilience of next-generation Internet architectures. This includes a focus on adaptive protection mechanisms capable of dynamically monitoring, detecting, and mitigating malicious behaviors. These behaviors, diverse in their objectives, may target the disruption of services, the compromise of users, or the destabilization of infrastructures.

Depending on the nature and maturity of the system, these protection mechanisms can take various forms:

• Intrinsic Measures: Embedded directly into system components during the design phase to ensure proactive and adaptive security.
• Extrinsic Measures: Introduced through dedicated security layers or components capable of autonomously detecting and responding to threats in real time.

The ultimate objective of this effort is to enable the Internet of the future to be not just a communication network, but a trustworthy and self-reliant foundation for the interconnected physical-digital ecosystems that define modern life.