School of Computer Science and Informatics

Cybersecurity and privacy

Our Centre for Cyber Security Research (CCSR) offers a holistic, integrated and theoretically informed approach to human and technical cyber security.

We are a leading UK academic research team focussing on the fusion of data science/analytics and artificial intelligence methods, with interdisciplinary insights into cyber risk, threat intelligence, attack detection and situational awareness.

In the last decade, the CCSR has grown its team to over 50 active researchers and has attracted nearly £20 million in external grant income. We have a world-class testbed in our state-of-the-art Abacws building, consisting of a scalable cyber range and various cyber-physical systems that are representative of real-world IT and operational technology systems, on which we train our students and validate our research outcomes.

We are also proud to work with local and international collaborators across all sectors to carry out research that tackles real challenges and excites and inspires our next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

Within this scope we have a number of core research themes including:

artificial Intelligence-driven Security Operations & Incident Management – focusing on early detection and automated responses to cyber attacks
risk Management & Governance – investigating goal-oriented risk, process and impact modelling, linked to data-driven intelligence
human factors – focusing on individuals’ susceptibility to attack, cognitive aspects, and organised cybercrime
cyber physical systems security and resilience – detecting digital and physical indicators of compromise and mitigating attacks
privacy and distributed systems security – ensuring privacy by design, whether in machine learning-based systems, or by improving transparency and trust in distributed (e.g. Cloud) and autonomous (e.g. vehicular) systems

Explore our research groups

Cyber security

We focus on the fusion of data science and artificial intelligence methods with interdisciplinary insights into cyber risk, threat intelligence, cyber threat modelling, predictive analytics, attack detection and situational awareness

Privacy

We look to detect, measure, and mitigate sensitive information leakage in various scenarios including data publishing, internet of things, mobile and cloud applications, and training machine learning algorithms.