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.
Research Goals
Explore storage system designed so that ransomware cannot destroy critical data. Such systems should be 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.