4th Specific Service Procedure

CYBERSTAND.eu provides € 1,500,000 to support contributions to the development of harmonised standards for the Cyber Resilience Act. 

This fourth funding cycle or Specific Service Procedure (SSP) targets cybersecurity specialists, Open Source contributors and representatives from Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) to contribute to the drafting and consensus building of the CRA horizontal standards.

The 4th SSP opens on 10th  February and will close on 7th March 2025.

Apply Now to the 4th SSP

The topics and priorities for the CYBERSTAND.eu SSP cycles are defined through continuous monitoring analysis of the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) and its Standardisation Requests. 

Guidelines for applying can be found below.

Check the guidelines for applicants.

4th SSP Topic Priorities

Services that address topics closely correlated priority areas of the CRA
standardisation requests (currently in preliminary draft) will be considered of equal validity and merit during the evaluation process.

Applications from Open Source contributors or Small and Medium Enterprises are encouraged.
More specifically, services should provide: 

• Contribution / recommendation / revise an existing standard
• Contribution to the drafting and consensus building of the CRA Horizontal Standards
• Contribution or delivery of a technical report / technical specification
• Participation in a WG or TC meeting as chair, convenor, participant, moderator or observer.
• Comment on standards development and drafts

Specific Service Procedures - Process and timing

CYBERSTAND will run 7 SSP cycles. Each call will be open for 30 days for proposal submission. At the end of the 30-day period all proposals received through the CYBERSTAND.eu platform will be screened for eligibility, evaluated by the selected External Evaluators (EE), scored, and ranked for selection. 

Please note that each application is independently evaluated by three members of the EE and undergoes quality control by a fourth member after consensus is reached to guarantee maximum fairness and transparency. As the EE are highly-skilled experts whose qualifications are assessed through a SSP process their decision is binding and any redress requests or complaints will be dealt with strictly in relation to the procedural aspects of the evaluation and not on the merits of scientific or technical judgement of the experts.

4th SSP timing

Launch: 10th February 2025, 9:00 CET
Deadline: 7th March 2025, 17:00 CET
Evaluation: Each proposal is evaluated by three External Evaluators and after consensus the evaluation undergoes a quality check by a fourth member of the EE. 
Notification of outcome: Applicants will be notified of the outcome of their proposal and provided with feedback from the External Evaluators in an Evaluation Consensus Report by the end of March 2025.

Who can receive financial support?

Potential applicants of CYBERSTAND.eu SSPs are European specialists who: 

• Are companies, individuals and natural persons that are citizens of EU Member States (including overseas countries and territories (OCTs)) and EEA countries (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein)
• Have experience regarding developments of standards, e.g., existing standards for development for CRA, SReq; existing CRA-related TC/WGs for development;
• Are not receiving support from other instruments (PPPs, EU or national R&I projects) for the proposed activities.

Type of contributions

Three types of proposals can be funded under the CYBERSTAND.eu SSPs, as shown below:

Description: Contribution to ongoing standards development as a chair, convener, rapporteur or member of an SDO WG. E.g. comments on standards development and drafts, attending meetings also as an observer, paying membership fees. Contribution to standards documentation e.g. liaison to WG, comments on standards drafts, participation at meeting with membership fee paid.

• Proposal type: ST - short-term contribution   
  • Maximum contract duration: 3 months
  • Funding range: up to 5.000€
• Proposal type: MT - mid-term contribution 
  • Maximum contract duration: 6 months
  • Funding range: up to 10.000€
• Proposal type: LT - long-term contribution
  • Maximum contract duration: 12 months
  • Funding range: up to 20.000€

Please do note that the maximum funding requested per proposal cannot exceed that indicated for the respective type of application (LT, MT, ST), nor can the duration exceed that indicated.

Eligible costs

• Personal Working Effort (this cannot exceed the EU maximum daily rate of 450 Euro)
• Travel costs
• Event registration fee(s)
• Membership fee(s) for European Standardisation Organisations or National Standardisation Bodies 

Evaluation criteria

The initial eligibility screening will be undertaken by the Consortium to assess compliance to the call. Services which are ineligible for any reason or which do not meet the call criteria will be identified as such and the applicant will receive an automatic notification from the system. 
The consortium will consolidate all eligible proposals and submit them to the external evaluators (EE) to undertake the formal evaluation.

The service applications will have to clearly demonstrate:

• The standardisation request items to be addressed
• Target TC/WG for output
• Impact of work on the CRA SReq/CRA/European interests/SMEs
• Expertise of the applicant in the relevant priority area(s)
• Service type and output

Evaluations (for each application) will be performed using the following 4-criteria principle (score 1 to 10):

• Criterion 1: Soundness of the application and foreseen impact on SSP topic and relevance to CRA SReq (30%);
• Criterion 2: Technical excellence & relevance of the activities proposed (30%);
• Criterion 3: Experience and qualifications of the applicant (20%);
• Criterion 4: Economics of the application considering the principle of best value for money (20%).

The application’s final score will be automatically determined by averaging scores from the various evaluators and then applying a weighting process among the 4 criteria as per the percentages indicated in the SSP. In case of a tie between 2 or more applications, the application received first will precede (the “time stamp” of submission will be the reference).