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Institute of Cyber Security for Society (iCSS)

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Research Projects

Since 2012, iCSS (previously as the Kent Interdisciplinary Research Centre in Cyber Security) has successfully attracted over £10 million of external funding to the University of Kent for cyber security related research projects, many of which have involved interdisciplinary research work. Our research has been funded through public sector funders such as UKRI (especially EPSRC and Innovate UK), European Commission, Dstl, NCSC and by our industrial partners.

Select an image to learn about some of our recent research activity, or read through a list of selected papers below.

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Dismantling wildlife trafficking cybercrime networks in Southeast Asia

David Roberts and Julio Hernandez-Castro lead on the project “Dismantling wildlife trafficking cybercrime networks in Southeast Asia,” funded by the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund (Defra).

Safe and Secure Software Systems

Dr Budi Arief collaborates with PhD student Tom Seed and Emeritus Professor Andy King, on a new project titled “Symbolic Computation for Mainstream Verification”.

Developing cyber skills amongst young people

Dr Virginia Franqueira, Professor Shujun Li and Dr Vince Miller have been awarded funding for a project that aims to understand how cyber security skills development is covered in pre-university curricula.

Cyber security risks for mobility-as-a-service (MaaS)

Professor Shujun Li will work with researchers at Cranfield University to look into the cyber security risks posed by a digitally enabled, low-carbon mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) ecosystem.

How SMEs can become more privacy aware

Dr Jason Nurse investigates current practices in relation to the drivers and unique obstacles that SMEs face, in making privacy-aware decisions.

Research projects

  • Budi Arief and Julio Hernandez-Castro, “Countering HArms caused by Ransomware in the Internet Of Things (CHARIOT),” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £426,648, 2023-2026
  • Marek Grzes and Vineet Rajani, “Safe and secure COncurrent programming for adVancEd aRchiTectures (COVERT),” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £374,699, 2023-2026
  • Rogerio de Lemos, Marek Grzes, Virginia Franqueira and Tracee Green, “A Pragmatic Approach For Generating Synthetic Data For Protecting Young People From Online Harm,” funded by EPSRC via the 2023 REPHRAIN Strategic Funding call, funding amount (all to Kent) £84,409, 2023-24
  • Marek Grzes and Rogerio de Lemos, “Reward shaping for network defence based on reinforcement learning,” funded by Dstl, funding amount (all to Kent) £301,229, 2023-2024
  • Xiaowei Gu and Gareth Howells, “An Explainable Generic Design of Self-Evolving Intelligent Security Systems for Cyber attack Detection,” funded by Dstl, funding amount (all to Kent) £122,556, 2023-2024
  • Anna Jordanous, Özgür Kafalı and Ioanna Giorgi, “Discovery Knowledge Graphs,” funded by Dstl, funding amount (all to Kent) £120,271.63, 2023
  • Vineet Rajani and Marek Grzes, “ML4CI: Machine Learning based Causal Inference for Cybersecurity,” funded by Dstl, funding amount (all to Kent) £81,616.19, 2023
  • Budi Arief, “Playing Cyber Security Games,” funded by Dstl, value to Kent £72,835, 2023
  • Simon Cooksey and Mark Batty, “Embedded Rust for Morello in Defence Applications,” funded by Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), funding amount (all to Kent) £87,763.05, 2023
  • Julio Hernandez Castro and Budi Arief. “Child-protection based strategies to fight against sexual abuse and exploitation crimes (ALUNA),” funded by the European Commission (Horizon Europe), value to Kent £230,938, 2023-2025
  • Shujun Li, “Improving the Privacy and Security in Federated Learning,” funded by Honda Research Institute Europe (Studentship), value to Kent £153,347, 2023-2026
  • Mark Batty, Simon Cooksey and Michael Vollmer, “Complementing capabilities: introducing pointer-safe programming to DSBD tech,” funded by Innovate UK, value to Kent £494,776, 2022-2024
  • Carlos A. Perez-Delgado, “Blockchain Technologies in a Quantum World,” funded by The Casper Association, value to Kent £155,100.90, 2022-2023
  • Jason Nurse and Gareth Mott, “The Cost of Ransomware to the UK Economy,” funded by NCSC, value to Kent £125,000, 2022-2023
  • Richard Guest, Gareth Howells, “Strengthening ICAC Technological Investigative Capacity,” funded by US Department of Justice, value to Kent £75,134, 2022-2023
  • Julio Hernandez-Castro, Budi Arief, Laura Bocchi, “Novel Strategies to Fight Child Sexual Exploitation and Human Trafficking Crimes and Protect their Victims (HEROES),” funded by European Commission (H2020), value to Kent €360,000, 2021-2024
  • Shujun Li (partner PI), “Mobility as a service: MAnaging Cybersecurity Risks across Consumers, Organisations and Sectors (MACRO),” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £175,123, 2021-2023
  • David Roberts, Julio Hernandez-Castro, “Dismantling wildlife trafficking cybercrime networks in Southeast Asia,” funded by the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund (Defra), value to Kent £154,616, 2021-2023
  • Jason Nurse and Gareth Mott, “Ransomware: The role of Cyber Insurance (RaCI),” funded by NCSC, value to Kent £86,000, 2021-22
  • Virginia Franqueira, Vince Miller and Shujun Li, “Developing cyber skills amongst young people,” funded by Global Affairs Canada through GFCE (Global Forum on Cyber Expertise), value to Kent €50,000, 2021
  • Afroditi Pina, Jennifer Storey, Marian Duggan, Virginia Franqueira, “Technology-facilitated domestic abuse: A multidisciplinary examination of methods,” funded by Home Office, value to Kent £98,966, 2021
  • Harmonie Toros, “Gendered Narrative Analysis of Post-Caliphate Returning Foreign Terrorist Fighters and Families,” funded by NCSC, value to Kent £68,324, 2021
  • Mark Batty, Stephen Kell, “CapC: Capability C semantics, tools and reasoning,” funded by EPSRC via the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (ISCF) Digital Security by Design call, value to Kent £481,258.87, 2020-2023
  • Julio Hernandez-Castro, “Assurance for quantum random number generators,” funded by Innovate UK, value to Kent £324,258, 2020-2023
  • Farzin Deravi, Richard Guest, “Privacy Matters (PriMa) Innovative Training Networks,” funded by European Commission (H2020), value to Kent £462,858, 2020-2023
  • Paraskevi Triantafyllopoulou, Michelle McCarthy and Shujun Li, “Safer online lives: use of the internet & social media by people with Intellectual Disabilities,” funded by NIHR (National Institute for Health Research) SSCR (School for Social Care Research), value to Kent £209,703, 2020-2022
  • Shujun Li, “Smart Healthcare System with Federated Learning,” joint UK-France PhD studentship funded through a competitive scheme between the I-SITE ULNE and the University of Kent, total funding amount €135,000 (split between the University of Kent and the French institution ENSAIT), 2020-2023
  • Virginia Franqueira, Sanjay Bhattacherjee, Shujun Li, “a regular techwatch newsletter on cyber deception,” funded by Dstl (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory), 2020-2022
  • Julio Hernandez-Castro, Carlos Perez-Delgado, “Quantum Communications Hub 2,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £575,345, 2019-2024
  • Jason Nurse, Shujun Li, “Approaches and Technologies to Support Home Users’ Engagement with Cyber Security,” PhD studentship funded by NCSC, value to Kent £115,153, 2019-2023
  • Stephen Kell, “Generalised static checking for type and bounds errors,” PhD studentship funded by NCSC, value to Kent £75,000, 2019-2023
  • Jason Nurse, “A Platform for Responsive Conversational Agents to Enhance Engagement and Disclosure (PRoCEED),” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £163,555, 2019-2021
  • Shujun Li, “PriVELT: PRIvacy-aware personal data management and Value Enhancement for Leisure Travellers,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £429,069, 2018-2023
  • Richard Guest, “An exploration of dynamic biometric performance using device interaction and wearable technologies,” funded by Callsign Inc., value to Kent £65,689, 2018-2021
  • Mark Batty, “Specification and Verification of C++ Data Structure Libraries,” PhD studentship funded by NCSC, value to Kent £69,118, 2018-2021
  • Scott Owens, “Building Verified Applications in CakeML,” PhD studentship funded by NCSC, value to Kent £96,024, 2018-2021
  • Richard Guest, Farzin Deravi, “A Performance Assessment Framework for Mobile Biometrics,” PhD studentship funded by GCHQ, value to Kent £118,190, 2017-2021
  • Jason Nurse, “Incentivising Cybersecurity through Cyber Insurance (ICCI)”, funded by NCSC and the Research Institute in Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS), value to Kent £20,000, 2020-2021
  • Julio Hernandez-Castro, “Robust Video Watermarking,” funded by Huawei Technologies, value to Kent £230,000, 2019-2020
  • Mark Batty, “Compositional, dependency-aware C++ concurrency,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £98,786, 2018-2020
  • Shujun Li, “ACCEPT: Addressing Cybersecurity and Cybercrime via a co-Evolutionary aPproach to reducing human-relaTed risks,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £162,044.34, 2017-2020
  • David Chadwick, “Verifiable Credentials,” funded by Innovate UK and DCMS through its Cyber Security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme (CyberASAP), value to Kent £89,934 (two phases combined), 2019-2020
  • Howard Bowman, Christopher Solomon, Stuart Gibson, “Forensic Facial Identification using the Fringe P3 brain wave response (EEG-FIT),” funded by Innovate UK, value to Kent £115,281, 2019-2020
  • Shujun Li, “Human-machine teaming for supporting human decision making to enhance security of cyber-physical systems,” funded by Dstl, value to Kent £87,000, 2018-2021 (cancelled because of withdrawal of the named PhD applicant)
  • Richard Guest, Farzin Deravi, “AMBER: Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (ITN) on Mobile Biometrics,” funded by European Commission (H2020), value to Kent £585,783, 2016-2020
  • Andy King, “The Rise and Fall of COOP,” PhD studentship funded by GCHQ, value to Kent £109,890, 2016-2020
  • Richard Guest, “Hummingbird: Human-machine integration for biometric authentication,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £143,100, 2018-2019
  • Aziem Chawdhary, Andy King, “Trustworthy Software for Nuclear Arms Control,” PhD studentship funded by NCSC, value to Kent £71,706, 2018-2019
  • Eerke Boiten, Budi Arief, Julio Hernandez-Castro, “EMPHASIS: Economic, Psychological, and Social Aspects of Ransomware,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £344,547, 2017-2019
  • David Chadwick, Rogério De Lemos, Theo Dimitrakos, “C3ISP: Collaborative & Confidential Information Sharing and Analysis for Cyber Protection,” funded by European Commission (H2020), value to Kent £448,300, 2016-2019
  • Gareth Howells, “SPIRIT: Security and Privacy for the Internet of Things,” funded by EPSRC (CHIST-ERA), value to Kent £174,413, 2016-2019
  • Gareth Howells, “INCASE: Industry 4.0 via Networked Control Applications and Sustainable Engineering,” funded by Interreg IV 2 Seas Programme (North), value to Kent £561,824, 2016-2019
  • Andy King, “Vulnerability discovery using abduction and interpolation,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £199,130, 2016-2019
  • Julio Hernandez-Castro, “SEEK (Steganalytic vidEo-rEsearch frameworK),” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £273,996, 2016-2019
  • Julio Hernandez-Castro, “RAMSES: Malware analysis for digital forensics,” funded by European Commission (H2020), value to Kent £305,815, 2016-2019
  • Farzin Deravi, Sanaul Hoque, “Biometric Counter-spoofing by Liveness Detection for Mobile Devices,” funded by Centre for Defence Enterprise (MoD), value to Kent £75,752, 2016
  • Andy King, Theo Dimitrakos, David Chadwick, “NeCS (European Network for Cybersecurity) MCSA ITN,” funded by European Commission (H2020), value to Kent £388,645, 2015-2019
  • Stuart Gibson, Christopher Solomon, Julio Hernandez-Castro, “Improving cyber security using realistic synthetic face generation,” Israel-UK Cyber Research project, UK part funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £155,087, 2015-2017
  • David Chadwick, “Horizontal cloud security and network capabilities for accredited cloud application and data,” funded by BT, value to Kent £170,000, 2015-2017
  • Julio Hernandez-Castro, “Authenticated Self – The ‘aS’ Platform,” funded by Innovate UK, value to Kent £115,957, 2015-2016
  • Richard Guest, Gareth Howells, “PIDaaS: Private Identity as a service,” funded by European Commission (FP7), value to Kent £145,103, 2014-2017
  • Shujun Li, “COMMANDO-HUMANS: COMputational Modelling and Automatic Non-intrusive Detection Of HUMan behAviour based iNSecurity,” Singapore-UK joint project, co-funded by EPSRC and Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), value to Ken £4,117 (partial transfer from the University of Surrey, total funding amount by EPSRC is £208,100), 2016-2018
  • David Chadwick, “Cloud-ABFAB federation services in eduroam (CLASSe),” funded by European Commission (FP7), value to Kent £72,458, 2013-2015
  • Andy King, “Se-Ma-Match: semantic malware matching,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £245,526, 2013-2016
  • Andy King, “Compositional security analysis for binaries,” funded by EPSRC and GCHQ, value to Kent £261,718, 2013-2016
  • Farzin Deravi, Gareth Howells, “COALAS: Cognitive Assisted Living Ambient System,” funded by Interreg IV programme, value to Kent £166,877, 2013-2015
  • David Chadwick, Dimitrakos, “FED4Fire: IPCS4FIRE & SCS4FIRE,” funded by European Commission (FP7), value to Kent £112,610, 2013-2014
  • Eerke Boiten, “Network on Formal Methods and Cryptography: CryptoForma 2,” funded by EPSRC, extension of a previously funded EPSRC research network, value to Kent £90,227, 2012-2015
  • David Chadwick, “Sticky policy based security APIs for the cloud,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £117,079, 2012-2013
  • Richard Guest, “SID – An exploration of ‘Super-Identity’,” funded by EPSRC, value to Kent £342,922, 2011-2015
  • Gareth Howells, “Autonomous and intelligent healthcare system (SYSIASS),” funded by Interreg IV 2 Seas programme, value to Kent £188,979, 2010-2014
  • Farzin Deravi, Gareth Howells, “NOBA: Nomadic Biometric Authentication,” funded by European Commission (FP6+FP7), value to Kent £227,841, 2007-2013
  • More smaller projects with a budget lower than £50k are not listed here.