Key Cardiff role in £14m UK IoT Security Centre

Cardiff University will play a key role in a £13.8m national Centre of Excellence for systems security around the Internet of Things (IoT).

The University’s Centre for Cyber Security Research is to lead the safety critical systems stream of the National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity – part of UK Government’s wider initiative to become a world leader in IoT and associated systems security.

Cardiff will work with other leading universities and industry as part of the PETRAS (Privacy, Ethics, Trust, Reliability, Acceptability, and Security) National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity.

PETRAS will research opportunities and threats that arise when Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies move from being centralised systems to operating at the periphery of the internet and local IoT networks.

Pete Burnap, Professor of Data Science & Cybersecurity in the School of Computer Science & Informatics, will lead the Cardiff stream.

“IoT technology is at the heart of future society and Cardiff University will be leading on security in supply chains and control systems that underpin critical national infrastructure. Our work on the fusion of AI and risk modelling to better understand cascading failure under cyber-attack will transform the next generation of cyber security methodologies that protect IoT devices deployed in critical infrastructures of the future," he said.

Funded by UK Research and Innovation through the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) as part of the Securing Digital Technologies at the Periphery (SDTaP) programme, this second phase of PETRAS will strengthen an already established and successful platform.

Since 2016, PETRAS has coordinated and convened 11 universities and 110 industrial and government User Partners in cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Professor Lynn Gladden, Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), said: “Funded through UKRI’s Strategic Priorities Fund, this IoT Centre of National Excellence will build on our previous investment in the initial PETRAS Hub in 2016. The work of this new Centre is vital for the evolution of the interconnected technologies that will permeate our society in the coming years. The strength and variety of industry and academic partners involved is evidence of the strength of the PETRAS team and the importance of research and innovation in this field.”