Research theme: Security, Trust and Privacy
Developing and protecting the next generation of smart infrastructure for financial markets, transport, healthcare and sustainable smart cities.
About our research
About our research
Our theme specialises in smart infrastructure - developing and protecting the data-controlled systems that interact with the physical world.
We are building the world’s first open-source, smart, digital twin for critical national infrastructure (CNI).
Our digital twin addresses industry-focused cybersecurity and communication challenges in Internet-of-Things-enabled CNI. It emulates critical components of wind/solar farms, smart cities/homes with electrical distribution, connected and autonomous vehicles, and vehicle charging technologies.
Having a real-time digital counterparts of physical systems allows us to study new communication technologies and cyber security solutions to provide secure, resilient and efficient services.
Our team develops and validates ‘zero-trust’, artificial intelligence-enabled and cryptographic solutions to a range of cyber security challenges. These include:
- blockchain theory, performance analysis and optimisation
- secure data sharing and processing in highly decentralised systems
- privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT)
- safety and security of cyber-physical systems (CPS)
Our intelligent transport researchers develop pioneering solutions to provide self-driving vehicles with a fast, reliable and lightweight distributed safety protocol in road networks.
IOT
Our research includes:
- the world’s first smart city digital twin
- one of the first IoT-specific security auditing toolkits
- a cryptographic track and trace solution for high-value products
- peer-to-peer energy distribution and optimisation in smart grid
Cyber security
Our research includes:
- standards, simulation and modelling of cyber resilience in cyber-physical systems
- AI-enabled botnet detection, data exfiltration and threat identification in the IoT
- blockchain theory and optimisation
- advanced persistent threats
- zero-trust security theory and implementation
Cybersecurity and IOT laboratory
Led by Professor Mohammad Hammoudeh, the cybersecurity and IoT research laboratory works with industrial and academic partners to address emerging security challenges in highly decentralised systems.
Our current active research topics include:
- protection of cyber-physical systems with hardware enforced zero-trust architecture (Partner: BlueSkyTec)
- digital twins in cyber effects modelling of IoT/CPS points of low resilience (Partners: PETRAS National Centre of Excellence, University of Warwick, Blueskytec, Schneider Electric)
- cryptocurrency digital forensics, tracking, tracing and recovery (Partners: University of Bristol, University of Salford, DigiTrace)
- defence methods against insider threats and advanced persistent threats using the zero-trust security model (Partner: University of Warwick)
- IoT and blockchain for secure track and trace of high value products (Partner: Kindus Solutions)
- AI-enabled cyber security solutions to protect evolving, cloud-based cyber-physical and IoT ecosystems and other data processing infrastructures (Partner: RaaIT)
- data preservation using blockchain-of-custody application (Partner: Climate Solutions Exchange)
- smart energy management and distribution
We welcome applications to conduct supervised PhD research in the following areas:
- threat intelligence, risk management and security resilience
- blockchain and cryptocurrency theory, consensus algorithms, optimisation and applications
- IoT, CPS communications, services, security and integration
- digital twins, simulation and modelling of highly decentralised systems
- smart places, Industry 4.0 and critical national infrastructure optimisation, safety and security
- artificial intelligence-enabled cyber attack and defence approaches
- network security, cryptography and identity management
Smart and sustainable cities (S2C) laboratory
Led by Dr Soufiene Djahel, our S2C research laboratory focuses on three key research areas to develop:
- ICT-based solutions to enable efficient and more sustainable operation of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and autonomous ships
- secure, privacy-preserving and lightweight solutions for better integration of sensing technologies (such as wearables and body sensors) to enable smart and affordable healthcare
- innovative approaches to enable more sustainable use of smart cities’ resources (such as computing, electric vehicles, CAVs, smart and micro-grid systems) through advanced resource harvesting, orchestration and recycling techniques
We welcome applications to conduct supervised PhD research in our topic areas. Our current S2C PhD projects include:
- Path planning and replanning techniques for cooperative UAVs
- Secure and privacy-preserving access to healthcare resources
- Designing fast and robust authentication schemes for body area networks
- Artificial intelligence-enabled air quality monitoring and prediction systems for more sustainable cities
- Fast, reliable and scalable communication protocols to support CAVs-enabled intelligent transportation systems
Selected projects
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Preventing prescription drug counterfeiting
Go to research
Protecting computer systems from attack
Prof Mohammad Hammoudeh explains how his research is helping to defend the world's networked computer systems, programmes and devices from infiltration and attack.-
Key publications
- Hodgkiss, J, Djahel, S and Zhang, Z (2021) A New Attack Method Against ECG-based Key Generation and Agreement Schemes in Body Area Networks IEEE Sensors Journal
- Ge, C, Wu, J, Yang, W, Kashif Bashir, A, Li, G and Hammoudeh, M (2021) Leveraging Graph Convolutional-LSTM for Energy-Efficient Caching in Blockchain-based Green IoT IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking
- Jogunola, O, Anoh, K, Ikpehai, A, Hammoudeh, M and Harris, G (2021) Multi-Commodity Optimisation of Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading Resources in Smart Grid Journal of Modern Power Systems and Clean Energy
- Popoola, SI, Adebisi, B, Hammoudeh, M, Gui, G and Gacanin, H (2021) Hybrid Deep Learning for Botnet Attack Detection in the Internet-of-Things Networks IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 8(6), pp 4944-4956
- Popoola, SI, Adebisi, B, Ande, R, Hammoudeh, M and Atayero, AA (2021) Memory-Efficient Deep Learning for Botnet Attack Detection in IoT Networks Electronics 10(9), pp 1104
- Djahel, S, Hadjadj-Aoul, Y and Pincemin, R (2020) CR-TMS: Connected Vehicles enabled Road Traffic Congestion Mitigation System using Virtual Road Capacity Inflation IEEE 23rd International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), pp 1-6
- Hodgkiss, J and Djahel, S (2020) Securing Fuzzy Vault Enabled Authentication in Body Area Networks based Smart Healthcare IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine
- Zemouri, S, Djahel, S and Murphy, J (2019) An Altruistic Prediction-Based Congestion Control for Strict Beaconing Requirements in Urban VANETs IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, 49(12), pp 2582-2597
Contact
Contact us
You can contact individual members of the team through their staff profiles.
For general enquiries, please contact research theme leads Prof Mohammad Hammoudeh and Dr Soufiene Djahel.