PhD Studentship: CyberDOME: Adaptive Moving Target Defence for Securing Critical Service in 6G Networks

Aston University

Supervisor: Dr. Sourav Saha and Prof Jose M Alcaraz Calero

Prospective Start Date: 1 July 2026

Applications are invited for a Postgraduate Research studentship, supported by College of Engineering and Physical Sciences to be undertaken within the Research Centre for Cyber Security, Privacy and Trust at Aston University, Birmingham, United Kingdom. The successful applicant will join an established experimental group working on Adaptive Moving Target Defence for Securing Critical Service in 6G Networks.

Financial Support

This studentship includes a bursary to cover the tuition fees rate, plus an annual maintenance allowance.

Details of the Project

In the era of AI, cyber-attacks are significantly increasing in sophistication, size, impact and damages for both our economy and citizens. The cost of cybercrime is projected to reach 7.7 trillion GBP in 2025. Thus, it is critical and od paramount importance to enhance our defence strategies with the usage of AI to better balance the AI tools available for the defence ecosystem.

Research Challenge/Problem: Several research challenges to investigate; 1) Manually managing moving targets is impractical in large-scale environments; 2) Identifying which parts of the system can be effectively changed or diversified without breaking functionality. 3) Ensuring consistent communication and operation between components when targets are moving; 4) Quantifying how effective MTD techniques are in preventing attacks is difficult. 5) MTD must coexist with traditional security measures like firewalls, IDS/IPS, and endpoint protection; 6) Frequent reconfigurations and diversifications consume additional resources (computational, bandwidth, human).

Research Aim and Objectives: It aims to deliver a bold cutting-edge technology: Moving Target Defense (MTD). MTD involves continuously changing and randomizing system. components and configurations to create a constantly shifting attack surface, making it significantly harder for attackers to find and exploit vulnerabilities. By increasing system complexity and uncertainty, MTD aims to lengthen the "attack lifetime," reduce the likelihood of successful exploits, and improve the chances of detecting and responding to threats. MTD will deliver novel security systems capable of protecting critical services and infrastructures, such as novel 6G infrastructures delivering a proactive defence mechanism to defend against various cyber-attacks such as a continuous-moving attackers delivering a distributed denial of service, spoofing, man-in-the-middle attackers.

This PhD research project aims to design and develop the first of its-kind Moving Target Defence solution for 6G-enabled services and applications. This solution aims to proactively identify and mitigate potential threats, existing vulnerabilities, and cyber-attacks where both attacks and victim are continuously moving across the network.

The aim will be pursued through the achievement of the following objectives:

1. Analyse state of the art in MTD and potential threats related to 6G infrastructures and services.
2. Design, analyse and implement a radically novel technique to allow the tracking of users within the complete network infrastructure.
3. Design, analyse, implement, deploy mechanisms using the previous tracking techniques to allow a continuous-moving-aware mitigation of cyber-attacks against 6G networks.
4. Apply the integrated system to a real-world cyber-threat use case, to be determined with the interests of the student and the guidance of the supervisory team.

Apply for this position via the above 'Apply' button.