May 15, 2026
INOCULUM Project Kicks Off
The INOCULUM project has officially started at INESC TEC, beginning research on a secure-by-design storage system …
Read more →Inoculating Storage
Against Ransomware
Researching performance and cost-effective secure-by-design storage systems resilient to ransomware attacks
Existing Defences Are Failing
Avoidance Falls Short
Access-control measures are bypassed by user misconfigurations and ransomware masking as trusted process.
Detection Lags Behind
Reactive by design — by the time an alert fires, data may already be encrypted. New ransomware variants evade detection.
Backups Have a Gap
Periodic backups leave a window of unrecoverable data. Cloud solutions add cost, latency, and sovereignty concerns.
Secure-by-Design, High-Performance Storage
Storage system designed so that ransomware cannot destroy critical data. Built for the performance demands of real storage appliances and data-intensive workloads.
No Backups Required
Copy-on-Write with a Write-Once-Read-Many strategy generates an immutable copy on every write. Full history is always present — no snapshots, no cloud, quicker recovery window.
Cost-Effective Storage
Explores compression and deduplication techniques to reduce storage costs. AI and heuristic-based algorithms are used to identify and increase protection on critical data under a ransomware attack.
Built for High-performance I/O
Explores efficient I/O via SPDK and io_uring to minimise CoW performance overhead and comply with the requirements of modern hardware and data-intensive applications.