The digitalization of the automotive industry has accelerated the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), fostering new solutions for safety, efficiency, and sustainable mobility. This article, developed within the scope of the IDT – PIVOT project, Incentive System for Business Research and Development – Individual Operations, aims to critically analyze the role of IoT and IoV in the automotive sector, exploring practical applications, conceptual architectures, and implementation challenges. The methodology consisted of a critical review of scientific and technical literature (2010–2025), complemented by institutional reports and industrial case studies, structured into four axes: IoT applications, communication networks, IoT/IoV architectures, and the evolution towards IoV. The results highlight clear benefits, such as accident reduction through V2X communication, improved efficiency via predictive maintenance, and environmental gains in intelligent mobility systems. However, significant limitations remain, including interoperability issues, latency, cybersecurity risks, costs, and social acceptance. Future perspectives point to the integration of 5G/6G networks, edge intelligence, and Mobility as a Service (MaaS) models, requiring robust public policies and global communication standards. It is concluded that IoT and IoV are strategic pillars for the transition towards connected, autonomous, and cooperative mobility.

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has been expanding several domains, offering unprecedented connectivity and convenience. However, this surge in interconnected devices has brought forth significant security challenges, as constrained budgets and development time leave security in a secondary role, or even non-existent. This is compounded upon by small design and development teams, where security expertise is reduced and lacking, creating a landscape of IoT systems that are unsecured and ripe for attack by malicious actors. The data gathered by these devices, their general lack of security, and the possibility of serving ans entry points to otherwise more secure systems, makes them increasingly tempting targets for exploration and exploitation. This thesis attempts to bridge the gap of aiding in the secure IoT system development, by approaching the issue of security in IoT from a standpoint of low knowledge and/or low expertise in IoT security. The first step towards the main goal is the extensive survey of existing IoT architectures and modeling tools, to aid in identifying the main challenges in secure IoT development and what can be improved or built upon. The second phase advances upon what was surveyed, by proposing an IoT system model that encompasses a large set of IoT ecosystems, and that embeds security in its essence, by identifying, for each system component, what are its critical security requirements, and what are the most attractive targets for an attacker on the given component. This model is complemented by the creation of an attack taxonomy, that attempts to take the most common attacks on IoT, and identifying where in the system those attacks may occur. To further aid the development process and provide a practical substrate to the Doctor of Philosophy (degree) (Ph.D.) work, an attack modeling tool named Attack Trees for IoT (ATIoT) is presented as a means to identify, starting from a system description given through a direct answer questionnaire, the attacks the system may be more susceptible to, providing the user with a set of attack trees, together with detailed node descriptions, of the identified attacks for the described system. Joining ATIoT, other existing tools are mapped to the proposed model, to further aid in identifying where security requirements, best practices, guidelines, security mechanisms and potential threats in an IoT system should be applied or can be found, further enhancing the usefulness of such tools. Motivated by the profound transformation that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is causing in the technological world, and the always fast advancing security area, a series of experiments of applying different AI mechanisms to the developed tools are also detailed herein. They specifically concern the application of classification models to the elicitation of security requirements, and the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for identifying potential attacks from a textual system description. The thesis presents the results of these experiments, which show the promise of applying such methodologies to the process of security engineering. Main conclusions include achieving the goal of creating a panoply of mechanisms and tools that aid the development of secure IoT systems, that were designed towards being used by developers with low or no security background and expertise. It was also concluded that AI methods can aid in the maintaining of such tools and mechanisms, ensuring their validity in a longer time period, a challenge always present in fast-paced, always evolving areas.

This study presents a current status and future trends of innovative and environmentally sustainable technological solutions for the post-harvest food supply chain and the food industry, in terms of ecological packaging, active, and/or intelligent packaging. All these concerns are currently highlighted due to the strong increase in the purchase/sale of products on online platforms, as well as the requirements for stricter food security and safety. Thus, this study aims to increase the global awareness of agro-industrial micro, small, and medium size enterprises for the adoption of innovative food solutions though industry digitalization (Industry 4.0), associated logistics and circular economy, with a concern for cybersecurity and products information, communication and shelf-life extension. The adoption of these guidelines will certainly foster along the complete food chain (from producer to consumer, with all intermediary parties) the awareness on environmentally sustainable technological solutions for the post-harvest food supply chain, and thus, promoting the future food sustainability required by the population increase, the climate change, the exodus of rural population to urban areas, and food loss and waste.

Com a evolução tecnológica, a dependência de recursos digitais é uma realidade inegável para as empresas modernas. A capacidade de adotar e integrar efetivamente as tecnologias digitais tornou-se um fator crucial para a competitividade, eficiência e sobrevivência no mercado atual. Esta dependência digital, embora traga benefícios, também expõe as organizações a riscos significativos, como ciberataques, entre os quais as campanhas de phishing têm um papel de destaque devido ao sucesso em explorar vulnerabilidades humanas. A Art Resilia, onde este projeto de estágio foi desenvolvido, é uma empresa especializada em fornecer soluções de ciber-resiliência. A sua missão centra-se em ser uma parceira de confiança, reconhecida pelo seu conhecimento e inovação, ajudando as organizações a se prepararem, responderem e recuperarem eficazmente de um panorama de ciberameaças em constante evolução. Neste contexto, este projeto consistiu no planeamento, desenvolvimento e implementação de uma framework de gestão e análise de templates e campanhas de phishing. A ferramenta poderá ser utilizada principalmente pelos analistas da empresa, permitindo-lhes criar e gerir templates de phishing personalizados, configurar campanhas adaptadas a diferentes clientes e recolher informações detalhadas sobre os resultados obtidos. Os clientes, tal como os analistas, terão acesso a dashboards, onde poderão consultar os dados recolhidos pelas campanhas realizadas nos seus colaboradores. Estes painéis, não só possibilitam efetuar análises comparativas com as médias agregadas das restantes empresas incluídas no sistema, como também permitem visualizar dados relevantes da própria organização, nomeadamente indicadores de reincidência, níveis de risco e métricas de desempenho – tanto individuais como por departamentos ou cargos –, fornecendo, assim, uma perspetiva detalhada sobre o seu desempenho de segurança. Este projeto teve como propósito possibilitar a recolha estruturada e detalhada de informações sobre a eficácia de campanhas de sensibilização, facilitando a consciencialização dos colaboradores das empresas clientes. Desta forma, a framework visa otimizar o processo de gestão de campanhas de phishing, garantindo resultados mais mensuráveis e alinhados com as necessidades dos clientes corporativos, contribuindo para o reforço contínuo das estratégias de defesa dos colaboradores face a ameaças baseadas em técnicas de engenharia social.

Este trabalho busca compreender os objetivos de securitização do ciberespaço chinês durante o governo do presidente Xi Jinping, considerando o conceito de securitização a partir de uma visão mais ampla que é adotada por Pequim ao longo do século XXI. Para isso, se analisou primeiramente o desenvolvimento do ciberespaço como um ambiente a ser securitizado e como este se tornou parte do jogo de poder entre as nações. Posteriormente foi observado o desenvolvimento da internet na China e como ocorreu o gerenciamento desta tecnologia por parte do Partido Comunista Chinês em âmbito doméstico para fins civis e econômicos. Finalmente, o emprego do ciberespaço como ferramenta a nível militar e diplomático durante o governo de Xi Jinping. Durante o trabalho se explora a ideia de que a atual política para o ciberespaço é resultado de fatores econômicos, sociais e políticos que remontam a períodos anteriores à chegada da internet ao país, mas que ao mesmo tempo rompe com projetos econômicos e diplomáticos seguidos desde o governo de Deng Xiaoping.

Cybersecurity is a subject that is constantly changing due to new forms of attack by online aggressors. This study focuses on attacks that have taken place in the virtual world and how they can be mitigated. With the increasing digitalization of virtual media, it is adolescents who are more likely to be victimized online. A sample of 198 Portuguese students from four schools in the center of Portugal were given the opportunity to answer a questionnaire that covered sociodemographic issues, school performance, intensity of internet use, perceived quality of life, internet dependenc y and the negative impact of using digital services. Binary Logistic was used to measure the relationship between cybercrime constructs such as stalking , credit card fraud and phishing in relation to other independent variables. The results showed that 24 of the participants had already been victims of stalking , 46.4 % had suffered from online harassment , 31.6 % shared private information , 16.8 had been victims of hacking/ identity theft , 5.1 % had been victims of fraud and phishing respectively, 76 % spend their time in online gaming , 39.2 make purchases in these online games, 47.4 % don't inform their parents of these purchases, 12.8 frequent gambling/casino sites , 8.6 % access the deepweb and 19.4 are involved in group chats that their parents don't know about.

In the current day and age, cybersecurity is of uttermost importance for our societies. Mechanisms such as CVEs have been created for cybersecurity professionals to better enumerate and communicate regarding existing public vulnerabilities. This very widely used technology was created in the finals of the ’90s and did not consider the huge number of vulnerabilities found nowadays. Parallel to this, there has been a shift in cybersecurity learning, with more and more professionals and students learning about cybersecurity in a hands-on or gamified way. In this dissertation, we aim to help professionals and students better learn about CVEs by creating a platform that contains a search engine for CVEs, showcasing information like PoCs available and vulnerable VMs to allow the users to learn about the CVE in a hands-on way. We also developed a automatically updated and manually curated repository for the same effect.

The relationship between attackers and defenders has traditionally been asymmetric, with attackers having time as an upper hand to devise an exploit that compromises the defender. The push towards the Cloudification of the world makes matters more challenging, as it lowers the cost of an attack, with a de facto standardization on a set of protocols. The discovery of a vulnerability now has a broader impact on various verticals (business use cases), while previously, some were in a segregated protocol stack requiring independent vulnerability research. Furthermore, defining a perimeter within a cloudified system is non-trivial, whereas before, the dedicated equipment already created a perimeter. This proposal takes the newer technologies of network softwarization and virtualization, both Cloud-enablers, to create new dynamic security mechanisms that address this asymmetric relationship using novel Moving Target Defense (MTD) approaches. The effective use of the exploration space, combined with the reconfiguration capabilities of frameworks like Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Management and Orchestration (MANO), should allow for adjusting defense levels dynamically to achieve the required security as defined by the currently acceptable risk. The optimization tasks and integration tasks of this thesis explore these concepts. Furthermore, the proposed novel mechanisms were evaluated in real-world use cases, such as 5G networks or other Network Slicing enabled infrastructures.

Edge Computing is a paradigm that has been gaining some popularity among the research community and the telecommunications industry, since it is viewed, by some, as a 5th Generation Mobile Network (5G) technology enabler. Some of its promises include a decrease in network latency and an increase in network throughput, by allowing computation to be performed at the Edge of the network, rather than on distant Cloud servers. These and other associated benefits are crucial for multiple businesses’ vertical use cases, such as Smart Factories, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Smart Cities, or Big Data Analytics, among many others. However, although some standardization organizations, such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), have been gathering efforts to specify this new paradigm, there is still a lack of real implementations and evaluations of a fully functional Edge Computing architecture. By this fact, the security aspects related to this new concept have been overlooked. Most of the academic research done in that field, until this point, is more focused on the theoretical than on the practical aspects, which leads to an absence of real cybersecurity implementations that can be used in a real Edge Computing infrastructure. To this end, this dissertation aims to propose a system to enhance the security of applications deployed at the network’s Edge. Therefore, it first proposes a state of the art Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) architecture based on the Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) framework, with a Proof of Concept (PoC), to fill the gap that exists in MEC implementations. Then, with that architecture in mind, it is proposed the first Moving Target Defense as a Service (MTDaaS) mechanism to date, which allows a Telecommunications Operator to offer an MTD system that protects any of its clients’ MEC Applications. The created methodology increases the protection of an application by increasing its heterogeneity, which in this work was achieved by moving the application’s version being executed over time. The evaluation made towards the PoC of that MTDaaS methodology demonstrated an increase of the attack difficulty in all phases of the Intrusion Kill Chain, except for the Weaponization and Delivery, meaning that with the presence of this system, a potential intruder will have less success in achieving its objectives when attempting to assault a MEC Application.

Edge Computing, as a paradigm, has gained popularity among both academics and the industry. It contradicts typical networks, in which all clients communicate with a central service, by assuming that computing is moved towards the edge of the network. When it comes to edge, or, specifically, Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC), clients are organized into clusters, and machines in the cluster, also known as nodes, can communicate directly instead of relying on a distant server. This, among other MEC organizational qualities, decreases network latency and increases network throughput. Thus, MEC is a 5G facilitator. 5G already has a variety of applications; however, MEC has been applied in factory settings, vehicular communication, and other mission-critical systems. However, the overall organization of MEC also makes the system opaque. It is possible there may be a malicious node or software, and it would be difficult to detect it. There should be some way to provide visibility into the cluster without affecting how it usually runs. Current solutions tend to provide visibility in the context of resource management. However, this does not provide useful data in the context of security. It is possible to reverse engineer behavior based on how the node uses resources; however, this is hard. A resource-centric solution does not enable mitigation, as attacks will mainly be detected when they are complete or so far along that mitigation is virtually impossible. Instead, solutions that aim to provide visibility for the sake of security of the cluster should focus on monitoring behavior. Thus, administrators will be able to easily see what actions are being taken on the node. However, all machines and systems have different security requirements. Thus, dangerous behavior can take many forms, meaning that monitoring should be highly customizable. The proposed system fulfills this, as it provides behavioral visibility into all nodes in the cluster and does not have a noticeable impact on nodes. It is also possible to attest that nodes are safe, along with the software used.