Chip cards such as bank cards or cards used in public transport are sought-after targets for attackers who often use side-channels to attack them. DISTANT is focused on the development of automated frameworks capable of assessing various potential side-channel and fault injection threats, originating from various sources. Such systems will provide security assessors, and especially companies producing chips for security applications, with an opportunity to detect potential weaknesses early and to adequately balance product security and implementation friendliness.

In the business world and for the government, an increasing number of organizations are migrating their IT to the cloud. One of the arguments for this is security, for two commonly cited reasons. Firstly, cloud providers have highly qualified personnel trained in IT security. Secondly, it is argued that cloud providers have a distributed infrastructure spread across the world, enabling them to better provide continuity during local outages and more effectively fend off (DDoS) attacks.