RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

I joined the first Royal Holloway CDT cohort in September 2013 following careers in the RAF, police and private sector. Having spent 10 years working in security and intelligence I was attracted to a move into academia by the increasing relevance of cyberspace to the field of security, a desire to expose myself to a different perspective and a growing thirst to learn. Traditional PhDs were available but the Cyber Security PhD at Royal Holloway offered something different; a truly multidisciplinary approach, with a close connection between Geopolitics and Information Security; the chance to take classes as well as conduct research; a close connection to the real world through industrial placements; and a cohort environment where we had others around us to learn from, help us out and reassure us that we weren’t as far behind as we thought we were. I began with no clear idea of my research area but soon realised that there was one topic which both interested me and animated the InfoSec ...

I came to the CDT almost as the token non-technical person in my cohort. With an academic background in War Studies I thought I was going to o ccupy a small nic he in cyber security separate from computer science and mathematics. I was partially right, but also very wrong. Sure, my previous knowledge was different from most other students, but instead of working in isolation from more technical colleagues I found that their skills and experiences e nrich ed my own work and i n turn I was able to enrich theirs – I hope! Cyber security truly is an interdisciplinary subject and for me the CDT offered an ideal environment to both appreciate and embr ace this. My research journey was unlike anything I could have envisaged – indeed, I am still not entirely convinced I did a PhD. My thesis emerged from my summer project investigating cyber wargaming, which had just been intended as an exploratory foray into something different and fun, but quickly grew into something much more substantial...

When I think back to my time as a PhD student at the Royal Holloway CDT in Cyber Security, my overriding feeling is of being thankful for the opportunities that I was presented with. I am not just referring to being given the chance to conduct research in an Information Security department that is internationally renowned for conducting high-quality research. The PhD program provided me with a range of skills that helped to shape my own personal development, and the path that I will follow in the future. My undergraduate background was in maths, though I worked for a short period of time as a software developer before I started on the PhD program. While I initially began with intentions of carrying out research in the area of game-theoretic modelling of cyber security situations, I altered course in my first year to studying theoretical cryptography (and secure computation). The flexibility of the program was instrumental in me finding an appropriate research topic. Being passionate...

Professor Keith Martin writes about how academic and business collaboration is crucial to cyber security, and how the government is tackling this with a number of new initiatives. Much has been said about the need for academic, business and government to work together to address the future cyber security challenges that society faces. This is a sensible proposition since cyber security affects everyone, and each sector brings different strengths and capabilities. Grand words and aspirations are one thing, but making such partnerships work is something else entirely. Full credit must be paid to the UK Government for setting the ball rolling with a number of constructive initiatives, most of which stem from the UK National Cyber Security Strategy. For example, the Academic Centre of Excellence in Research (ACE-CSR) scheme has made it simpler for external partners to identify academic institutions with a critical mass of cyber security research capability and experience. The National Cy...

The CDT programme has been for me much more than a PhD scholarship: it allowed me to train my personal and technical skills, it offered me the opportunity to network with industry partners and to intern with great companies, and it gave me a sense of community.  Also, the CDT funding gave me enough support to attend several conferences around the world,  thanks to which my research could flourish. My journey as a CDT student begun right after I completed my MSc in Machine Learning at RHUL.  I had always had a passion for Information Security, which until then I had only pursued in my spare time.  For the following four years, the CDT allowed me to work on this full-time, alongside with my main interest, Machine Learning. The CDT gave me the great privilege to attend workshops and conferences, even when I did not have a paper to present there.  This was invaluable, particularly during the first years: it helped me both to select a research topic and to find i...

When I started out on the first cohort of CDT students in 2013, my proposed thesis was about military geographies. Influenced both by my time as a police officer in London, and by a brief but unsettling deployment to Iraq as a reservist soldier in 2003, I wanted to research how the military is represented in different physical, cultural and online spaces - specifically when away from the actual field of battle. Framing this proposal as a security issue was not difficult, especially as all things ‘cyberwar’ were particularly hot that year. It was my first-year summer project that changed all that. I’d been at a briefing at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on the national and military security risk posed by the friends and family of service personnel posting compromising information on social media. Which was fine, except the phrase that kept being used was not ‘friends and family’, but ‘wives and girlfriends’, which not only erroneously gendered the problem, but also add...