About the Project
Cybersecurity is a hard challenge in any system. The ever-increasing interconnectivity and dependencies across the boundaries of such infrastructures make it even harder. Legacy (often insecure) and contemporary (fast-release with hitherto undiscovered vulnerabilities) hardware, software and services are connected, often on-the-fly, due to millions of user interactions. This is compounded by complex and changing supply chains with varying levels of security assurances and trust.
The proposed projects seek to improve cybersecurity or cyber resilience by exploring the problem from different perspectives and designing interventions to shape new products, policies or security behaviours.
As cybersecurity is multidisciplinary the research will focus on one of the following cutting-edge areas of cybersecurity research:
- Human Aspects of Cybersecurity – explore a human aspect of cybersecurity including human motivation, behaviour, usable and accessible design, policy and governance that is leading to non-optimal cyber resilience within a particular context.
- Malware and Network Intrusion Detection – develop new methods for identifying and mitigating malicious software and activity across digital systems and networks.
- Securing the Internet of Things (IoT) – design and evaluate robust solutions to safeguard connected devices, networks and digital infrastructures within a particular context for example healthcare.
- Ethical Hacking and Offensive Security – advance ethical, legal and responsible techniques for vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and disclosure of security flaws.
The successful candidate will join the growing research community within Abertay’s cyberQuarter, a hub for cybersecurity innovation, industry collaboration, and academic excellence.
Key project phases:
- Understanding the current state of the art: the candidate will review the problem space, identifying current approaches, their pros and cons and gaps which the research will fill.
- Identifying and building an intervention: the candidate will explore possible solutions to the gap they have identified. An iterative approach will be adopted as requirements are uncovered and different approaches evaluated. This may be a technical, process, or behaviour based intervention.
- Evaluating the intervention: The candidate will evaluate the intervention within the context it was designed for.
