CSIT brings together complementary research clusters to carry out research focused on market informed grand challenge areas.

• Secure Connected Devices
• Networked Security Systems
• Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Security
• Security Intelligence

 

RESEARCH PROGRAMMES

CSIT currently has 90 staff comprising academic researchers and a significant engineering, professional services and commercial team with deep domain expertise in cyber, driving innovation activities and making it one of the largest centres of its kind in the UK.

Significant research programmes to date have included:

• The £5m UK Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems (RISE), funded by EPSRC and the NCSC and led by Professor Máire O’Neill www.ukrise.org
• SAFEcrypto – Worth €3.8m, this was the first major Horizon 2020 project to be co-ordinated in Northern Ireland – investigated practical postquantum cryptographic solutions www.safecrypto.eu
• CAPRICA and COSMIC – investigating secure and resilient approaches to trustworthy industrial control systems. Led by Professor Sakir Sezer and Dr Kieran McLaughlin, core projects in the UK Research Institute in Trustworthy Interconnected Cyber-physical Systems www.ritics.org/caprica

CSIT was one of the first Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research recognised by the NCSC and EPSRC in 2011 with that status retained in the 2016 round assessment.

100% of our research REF results are world-leading or internationally excellent, ranking 5th in the UK for research which is of the highest quality.

 

ACADEMIC RESEARCH IMPACT

Over the years CSIT has produced impressive research that has truly had an impact in the cyber security industry. Some examples include:

• Paper on ‘Optimised Multiplication Architectures for Accelerating Fully Homomorphic Encryption’, X. Cao, C. Moore, M. O’Neill, E. O’Sullivan, N. Hanley, published in IEEE Transactions on Computers, was chosen as IEEE Trans. on Computers ‘Editor’s pick of the year 2016’
• In 2015, to celebrate 25 years of the International Conference on Fieldprogrammable Logic & Applications (FPL) research into ;FPGA Implementations of the Round Two SHA-3 Candidates’ was awarded as one of 27 papers ‘deemed to have most strongly influenced theory and practice in the field’
• Open-source tools, DELTA (SDN Security Evaluation) and TENNISON (SDN Security Framework), which are used in education and have also generated industry interest, specifically DELTA for testing the security of SDN devices
• Dr. KW Wong Best Paper Award 2018, Elsevier Journal of Information Security and Applications
• STPA-SafeSec: ‘Safety and security analysis for cyber-physical systems’, I. Friedberg, K. McLaughlin, P. Smith, D. Laverty and S. Sezer, Published June 2017; Selected on the grounds of originality and impact from the publications of 2016–2018