🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the challenges small and medium-sized enterprises face in fulfilling the full lifecycle compliance obligations of the EU Cyber Resilience Act by developing an open-source compliance platform. Methodologically, it introduces a "compliance chain" structure that seamlessly links risk assessments, controls, policies, and machine-attested evidence to technical documentation and EU declarations of conformity. Furthermore, the platform integrates ISO/IEC 27001, NIS2, and GDPR controls while incorporating AI-driven remediation and an automated evidence collection engine to enable end-to-end traceability. The proposed solution has been deployed across 43 organizations, and its efficacy in identifying and closing operational gaps was validated through an end-to-end SIEM/XDR case study.
📝 Abstract
The EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) turns product cybersecurity into a lifecycle compliance obligation for manufacturers, importers, distributors, and integrators of products with digital elements on the EU market, a load that falls largely on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that rarely have dedicated governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) capacity. We present CYBERFORT, an open-source CRA-first compliance platform developed under the EU Digital Europe Programme and one of twelve projects in the EU CRA cluster. CYBERFORT operationalises the CRA through a guided scope self-assessment, a question bank tied to Annex I and the vulnerability-handling obligations, and a compliance-checking engine that links every answer to controls, policies, and machine-attested evidence, reusing ISO/IEC 27001, NIS2, and GDPR controls only where they coincide with CRA obligations. Its central contribution is the compliance chain, a traceable structure linking each product risk through its controls and policies to the CRA obligations it satisfies, and onward through evidence to the technical-documentation file and EU declaration of conformity, so that every operational gap is traceable and can be closed before market placement. Deployed at https://access.cyber-fort.eu/ for a first cohort of 43 organisations, the platform is presented with the engineering behind the chain, measured results from a completed end-to-end case study on a SIEM/XDR product with AI-driven remediation spanning the CRA obligation chapters, and the controlled effort study that remains in progress.