CS2 undertakes interdisciplinary research with experts in computer science (cyber risk, verification, forensics), engineering (IoT security), law (privacy and data protection), psychology (face and voice recognition) and business (cyber economics).
The Social and hUman ceNtered XR (SUN)
2022 -2025
SUN aims at investigating and developing extended reality (XR) solutions that integrate the physical and the virtual world in a convincing way, from a human and social perspective. Our role is to help protect XR against cyber attacks with the first cyber-physical threat detection system that is able to warn a user before an XR threat escalates into a safety incident.
Team: Prof. George Loukas (P.I.), Dr. Georgia Sakellari (co-I), Prof. Manos Panaousis (co-I)
Funding: Horizon Europe Budget: €6.4M (UoG: £412K)
Digital Technologies ActiNg as a Gatekeeper to information and data flOws (TANGO)
2022 -2025
TANGO explores cross-sector data sharing by taking a citizen-centric, secure and trustworthy approach and creating a platform that provides transparent, secure, fair and accountable, as well as environmentally sustainable, data management. Our role entails evaluating data privacy risks stemming from data sharing, encompassing those associated with the utilisation of machine learning.
Team: Prof. Manos Panaousis (P.I.), Dr. Sakshyam Panda (co-I).
Funding: Horizon Europe Budget: £9M (UoG: £221K)
CHAI: Cyber Hygiene in AI-enabled Domestic Life
2020 -2023
CHAI's aim is to help the individual protect themselves against security risks in AI enabled environments. We argue that in AI enabled domestic life, new cyber hygiene measures need supporting by diagnostic tools that allow users to identify security attacks and appropriate training. This will be achieved through the following goals: (i) identify and demonstrate the novel security breaches introduced by AI in the home; and to assess the social, psychological and neuroscientific factors that may influence an individual's susceptibility; (ii) employ and improve the use of methods already proposed in AI for improving the explainability of AI decisions in order to provide diagnostic information that allows users to identify AI security breaches; (iii) develop new cyber hygiene measures, i.e. diagnostic and actionable steps that users may take to address a breach, optimised to the user and situation; (iv) co-design a novel cyber hygiene training programme with users of home technology that supports the use of Explainable AI while personalising and optimising the training to match each individual. CHAI focuses on the social housing sector, which is introducing several AI initiatives, such as housing management chatbots, building maintenance bots, and smart thermostats.
Team: Dr. George Loukas (Project coordinator and P.I.), Dr. Manos Panaousis (co-I), Dr. Anatolij Bezemskij
Funding: EPSRC Budget: 2.4M GBP (UoG: 453K GBP)
RESCUER
2021-2024
RESCUER is developing a toolkit for augmented data collection and sharing in the ad hoc intra-team communications of emergency management operations. UoG's role is in ensuring the trustworthiness of the data exchange between stakeholders in a manner that is efficient and practical.
Team: Dr. Georgia Sakellari (PI), Dr. George Loukas (co-I), Dr. Muhammad Taimoor Khan (co-I)
Funding: H2020 Budget: 7M Euro (UoG: 441K Euro)
a fraMEwoRk to model and IncenTivise cyber security decisions
2020-2021The MERIT framework addresses the challenge of how to take better cyber security investment decisions. It aims at minimising cyber security risks by optimally investing a budget in implementing and maintaining cyber controls while retaining a part of this budget for outsourcing cyber risks. The implementation of MERIT optimises organisations' cyber security postures but it is also an effective way to reduce the accumulation of risks across a cyber-insurer's customer base. This work will undertake a multi-disciplinary approach by utilising both economics and cybersecurity engineering insights to significantly extend the state-of-the-art in decision support for cybersecurity spending. It will combine econometrics, game theory, mathematical optimisation and cyber security concepts.
Team: Dr. Manos Panaousis (P.I.), Dr. George Loukas (co-I)
Funding: NCSC Budget: 60K GBP (UoG: 52K GBP)
2020-2022
ENSURESEC will be a sociotechnical solution for safeguarding the Digital Single Market's e-commerce operations against cyber and physical threats. It combines an automatic, rigorous, distributed and open-source toolkit for protecting the e-commerce infrastructure, with monitoring of the impact of threats in physical space and a campaign for training SMEs and citizens aimed at creating awareness and trust. It addresses the whole gamut of modern e-commerce, from standard physical products purchased online and delivered via post, to entirely virtual products or services delivered online.
Team: Dr. Muhammad Taimoor Khan (P.I.), Dr. Ivana Tonic (co-I), Dr. George Loukas (co-I), Dr. Georgia Sakellari (co-I)
Funding: H2020 Budget: 9M Euro (UoG: 489K Euro)
CUREX: seCUre and pRivate hEalth data eXchange
2018- 2021The Health sector's increasing dependence on digital information and communication infrastructures renders it vulnerable to threats to privacy and cybersecurity, especially as the theft of health data has become particularly lucrative for cyber criminals. At the same time, a breach of integrity of health data can have dramatic consequences for the patients affected. CUREX addresses comprehensively the protection of the confidentiality and integrity of health data by producing a novel, flexible and scalable situational awareness-oriented platform. It allows a healthcare provider to assess the realistic cybersecurity and privacy risks they are exposed to and suggest mathematically optimal strategies for addressing these risks with safeguards tailored specifically for each business case and application.
Team: Dr. Manos Panaousis (P.I.), Dr. George Loukas (co-I), Dr. Caxton Okoh, Kokulan Natkunam
Funding: H2020 Budget: 5M Euro (UoG: 270K Euro)
SECONDO: a Security ECONomics service platform for smart security investments and cyber insurance pricing in the beyonD 2020 networking era
2018-2022
In light of the evolving threat landscape, SECONDO has the ambition to overcome the large amount of uncertainty about: a) the scale of cyber risk to businesses, especially for SMEs; b) the Return on Investment of managing and mitigating the risks; and c) the estimation of cyber insurance exposure and related insurance premiums. SECONDO will provide new insights into the nature of next generation security economics tools and platforms. The main innovation of SECONDO is the research and development of an innovative data-driven platform that supports all relevant stakeholders in making optimal, risk-based and industry-specific cyber security investment decisions.
Team: Dr. Manos Panaousis (P.I.), Emily Parsons
Funding RISE Budget: 1.6M Euro (UoGL 200K Euro)
C4IIoT: Cybersecurity 4.0 - Protecting the Industrial Internet of Things
2019-2022
C4IIoT will build and demonstrate a novel and unified Industrial IoT cyber security framework for malicious and anomalous behaviour anticipation, detection, mitigation and end-user informing. Our role is to equip the framework with the ability to decide dynamically where to process the security-relevant data it collects in a manner that takes into account the performance, energy and security of the system.
Team: Dr. Georgia Sakellari (P.I), Dr. George Loukas (co-I)
Funding: H2020 Budget: 6.3M Euro (UoG: 250K Euro)
EUNOMIA: User-oriented, secure, trustful and decentralised social media
2018-2021
For digital space threats that focus on deceiving a human, it is often the case that the human is much better placed at spotting them than a computer system would ever be. The argument against is always that the human sensor can be unreliable, but the degree of reliability can be predicted for each user, and very often the human sensor is the only sensor. In EUNOMIA, we aim to demonstrate convincingly the usefulness of the human-as-a-sensor paradigm in relation to information trustworthiness in social media. By providing the right tools, infrastructure and conditions, EUNOMIA will help social media users take ownership of the disinformation problem.
Team: Dr. George Loukas (project coordinator and P.I), Ryan Heartfield (WP4 leader), Dr. Georgia Sakellari (co-I)
Funding: H2020 Budget: 2.94M Euro (UoG: 512K Euro)
SecureHajj
2018-2019
We develop a framework for providing Hajj and Umrah services to pilgrims, their family members, Hajj agencies, municipality, governments, health institutions and emergency handling agencies in an automated, real-time and contextually relevant manner, allowing to be in touch with a subset of their community of interest. We develop a proof of concept implementation leveraging the spatio-temporal multimedia sensory data captured by an existing framework of ours to define and share users' contexts. We utilise Blockchain technology in the form of the permissioned ledger paradigm as a key component of the decentralised security provision of the framework.
Team: Dr. George Loukas (project coordinator and P.I), Yasmine Arafa (co-I), Sameet Sidhu
Funding: British Council GSIKE Budget: 42K GBP (UoG: 20K GBP)
Cocoon: Emotion psychology meets cyber-physical security in IoT smart homes
2016-2019
We interweave innovations in two distinctly different disciplines to understand and improve security of home IoT technology: emotion psychology and cyber security. We produce an understanding of the psychology of IoT users, assess risks in current and future IoT systems, and formulate provisions for the design and integration of user-centric IoT in tomorrow's homes. We put the user at the center of the IoT landscape of technology: By combining expertise in emotion psychology, value-sensitive design, cyber security, network communication and real-time big data analytics we create a framework that adapts to user profiles, empowering them to make the right decisions for a safe IoT environment.
Team: Dr. George Loukas (P.I.), Dr. Avgoustinos Filippoupolitis (co-I), Dr. Ryan Heartfield, Dr. Anatolij Bezemskij
Funding: EPSRC CHIST-ERA Budget: 1M Euro (UoG: 277K Euro)
TRILLION: Trusted Citizen-LEA collaboration over social networks
2015-2018
TRILLION developed an innovative socio-technical platform to foster effective collaboration between citizens and law-enforcement agencies. To achieve this, TRILLION provides multiple channels for incident discovery, prediction, reporting and interaction. Citizens will have the choice of using existing social networks or directly reporting incidents via native mobile applications. Through such reporting via the TRILLION platform, law-enforcement agencies will be able to detect incidents more efficiently, with information collected used to detect and respond to unfolding security situations in real time. It employs a wide range of geo-location technologies, including those that enhance incident reporting in confined spaces, such as shopping malls, cinema complexes, event areas and stadiums. Our role was the development of software tools and techniques for establishing the cyber-trustworthiness of the information shared via TRILLION.
Team: Dr. George Loukas (P.I.), Prof. Liz Bacon (co-I), Prof. Lachlan Mackinnon (co-I), Edward Phillips (co-I), Dr. Avgoustinos Filippoupolitis (co-I), Dr. Syed Sadiqur Rahman, William Oliff, David Kananda, Adam Klosowski , Domenico Galimi
Funding: H2020 Budget: 4.3M Euro (UoG: 335K Euro)