The Potential of Zero-Knowledge-Proof to the Attribution Dilemma

Cyber incidents are on the rise and represent a threat to states' sovereignty. The attribution of those cyber incidents is essential to state's response to cyberthreats. As a result, scholars have focused on the process of attribution and evidentiary standards for proving the provenance of cyberattacks. Nevertheless, with only a legal system establishing evidentiary standards for attributing cyberattacks, states will still be limited to sharing evidence for not comprising cyber operations and revealing sensitive data. For this reason, the research proposal suggests that rather than setting evidentiary standards, the method of zero-knowledge proofs could solve the problem in question. It could allow states to prove cyberattacks' provenance and attribute them to other states without revealing sensitive information. Being the first study to address such a question with zero-knowledge proofs, it should, therefore, be of value to policymakers, researchers, and students in the field of international security.

The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cybersecurity will train over 55 experts in multi-disciplinary aspects of cybersecurity, from engineering to crime science and public policy.

Short term impacts are associated with the research outputs of the 55+ research projects that will be undertaken as part of the doctoral studies of CDT students. Each project will tackle an important cybersecurity problem, propose and evaluate solutions, interventions and policy options. Students will publish those in international peer-reviewed journals, but also disseminate those through blog posts and material geared towards decision makers and experts in adjacent fields. Through industry placements relating to their projects, all students will have the opportunity to implement and evaluate their ideas within real-world organizations, to achieve short term impact in solving cybersecurity problems.

In the longer term graduates of the CDT will assume leading positions within industry, goverment, law enforcement, the third sector and academia to increase the capacity of the UK in being a leader in cybersecurity. From those leadership positions they will assess options and formulate effective interventions to tackle cybercrime, secure the UK's infrastructure, establish norms of cooperation between industries and government to secure IT systems, and become leading researcher and scholars further increasing the UK's capacity in cybersecurity in the years to come. The last impact is likely to be significant give that currently many higher education training programs do not have capacity to provide cybersecurity training at undergraduate or graduate levels, particularly in non-technical fields.

The full details of our plan to achieve impact can be found in the "Pathways to Impact" document.