INOCULUM Project Kicks Off

We are pleased to announce the official kick-off of the INOCULUM project — Boosting the Immunity of Storage Systems Against Ransomware — funded under the NORTE 2030 programme (NORTE2030-FEDER-00868400), with a start date of May 15, 2026.

About the Project

INOCULUM will research and develop secure-by-design storage systems tailored for high-performance storage appliances, designed from the ground up to be resilient against ransomware attacks. Unlike existing detection or avoidance solutions, INOCULUM ensures that data is always recoverable — without relying on periodic backups, snapshot schedules, or costly cloud storage services.

The core innovation is a Copy-on-Write (CoW) storage strategy where every data modification produces an immutable copy. Ransomware that successfully encrypts files will always write to a new version, leaving all previous content intact and recoverable. This approach is complemented by high-performance and cost-efficient I/O research — exploring frameworks such as SPDK and io_uring and techniques such as data compression and deduplication— to make the security guarantees practical for data-intensive applications and the infrastructures supporting these.

Research Team

The project is led by João Paulo (Principal Investigator, Assistant Professor at University of Minho and Senior Researcher at INESC TEC), with a multidisciplinary team of researchers from INESC TEC combining expertise in storage systems, cybersecurity, and machine learning.

What’s Next

Follow the team’s broader research at DSR/HASLab.