Analysing Trends in International Cybersecurity Capacity Building Initiatives

There is a large investment being made by the international community aimed at helping nations and regions to develop their capacity in cybersecurity. The work of the Oxford Martin School's Global Cyber Security Capacity Centre GCSCC studies and documents this.

One key output of the GCSCC is the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise (GFCE) Inventory which provides a central point of reference for current international and regional capacity building efforts around the world in the key areas of cybersecurity.
https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/cybersecurity-capacity/explore/gfce
Another core component of the GCSCC is the Cyber Security Capacity Maturity Model (CMM) which benchmarks a country's cybersecurity capacity across five distinct dimensions of cybersecurity capacity

This research project has twofold objectives; firstly to analyse regional trends in capacity building in cybersecurity, the nature of the work and the partnerships that exist to support it. That analysis of the initiatives will be guided by the Cyber Security Capacity Maturity Model (CMM), aiming at identifying gaps in the funding of capacity building and misallocation of these funds in less important factors. The second and main objective is to provide the principles for successful cybersecurity initiatives based on a rigorous analysis of a small number of them.

The research question to be addressed is "What are the lessons learnt from the current cyber capacity building activities and what aspects of these initiatives are crucial for their success?" The focus will be on a specific region and on a specific maturity dimension of the GCSCC model. These will be determined after the initial analysis of the capacity building activities.

This research comes under the EPSRC Cyber Security theme

It is part of the nature of Cyber Security - and a key reason for the urgency in developing new research approaches - that it now is a concern of every section of society, and so the successful CDT will have a very broad impact indeed. We will ensure impact for:

* The IT industry; vendors of hardware and software, and within this the IT Security industry;

* High value/high assurance sectors such as banking, bio-medical domains, and critical infrastructure, and more generally the CISO community across many industries;

* The mobile systems community, mobile service providers, handset and platform manufacturers, those developing the technologies of the internet of things, and smart cities;

* Defence sector, MoD/DSTL in particular, defence contractors, and the intelligence community;

* The public sector more generally, in its own activities and in increasingly important electronic engagement with the citizen;

* The not-for-profit sector, education, charities, and NGOs - many of whom work in highly contended contexts, but do not always have access to high-grade cyber defensive skills.

Impact in each of these will be achieved in fresh elaborations of threat and risk models; by developing new fundamental design approaches; through new methods of evaluation, incorporating usability criteria, privacy, and other societal concerns; and by developing prototype and proof-of-concept solutions exhibiting these characteristics. These impacts will retain focus through the way that the educational and research programme is structured - so that the academic and theoretical components are directed towards practical and anticipated problems motivated by the sectors listed here.