Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research - Imperial College London

The Centre at Imperial was one of the first recognised academic centres of excellence in Cyber Security Research and is playing a significant leadership role in the UK. Imperial is leading the Research Institute on Program Analysis and Verification and the Research Institute in Trustworthy Industrial Control Systems, has played a major role in the creation and running of the PETRAS IoT Research Hub - Cybersecurity of the Internet of Things, and is involved in other large scale collaborations.

The Centre aims to address difficult challenges of national importance in cyber-security leveraging its excellence in research in both engineering and the natural sciences. To achieve this it works in close partnership with external stakeholders including both government and industry. The Centre's strategy combines recruitment and development of talented staff, with integration of research across security science and technology activities, expansion of the research programme through both internal and external collaborations and through using research outcomes and expertise from other engineering and natural sciences areas to address cybersecurity challenges.

The Centre comprises 25 members across several College departments and numerous research groups covering a broad portfolio of research. Further associate members bring in additional expertise in specific areas.

This Centre focuses on the engineering and design of secure and resilient computer systems, addressing security issues both early in the design cycle through formal analysis and verification, and during its operation through maintenance and system adaptation. Broadly, we group the activities of the centre in research themes that concern:

i. Security Analysis and System Verification covering Building Trusted and Trustworthy Systems, Static and Dynamic Analysis of Products and Systems, Software Engineering Techniques, Provable Security, and Formal Methods

ii. Operational Systems and Information Assurance covering Data-Centric Security, Privacy, Intrusion and Anomaly Detection, Intrusion Tolerance Techniques, Data Centric Security, Recovery Techniques, Real-Time Situational Awareness, Trust and Risk management.

The themes are applied in a variety of contexts, from embedded sensing systems and IoT, to autonomous systems, Industrial Control Systems, distributed systems, middleware and Cloud environments. The centre actively encourages and pursues collaborations with public and private sector partners worldwide.

The impact of this project will be in terms of:

a) promoting the Centre's capability and research achievements to a large number of industry and government organisations thereby increasing the adoption of the latest research results towards the design and engineering of secure software systems.

b) enhancing the research agenda of the the Centre by enabling new collaborations and bringing the latest practical challenges from the broader cyber security efforts to the attention of researchers within the Centre.

c) improving research results towards more comprehensive cyber security solutions by leveraging complementarity and enhancing collaborations with other centres of excellence.

d) improving better communication and understanding of the cyber security challenges to a broader audience.