RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

Looking back at my time in the CDT, I really couldn’t imagine doing my PhD anywhere else and I feel very grateful for the many opportunities it has presented to me. Not least that I was accepted me as a student in the first place! When I graduated from the University of Manchester with a Mathematics degree in 2013, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Having spent much of the next year failing to ‘find myself’ on a backpacking trip around Asia, I stumbled across cryptography and wondered if this might be a way that I could use the pure mathematics I had enjoyed in my degree in an applied context. I’d never done any formal work in cryptography and my computer science skills didn’t extend far beyond a cursory grasp of Excel, so I feel very lucky that the CDT was willing to take a chance on a student with a lot of enthusiasm but very little concrete experience. The CDT attracts students from a real mixture of backgrounds and areas of expertise, and the diverse cohort this creates is o

Once again, 2020 was a great year for CDT student participation in the Atlantic Council “Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge.” The third annual competition in London was the toughest to date, starting with a competitive entry process. Of more than 30 UK-based teams who applied, only 17 (including two teams from RHUL CDT) were selected to compete. One of our teams went on to the Final Round of this year’s competition, placing Third. Convened in different locales around the world, teams comprised of four students simulate the high-pressure task of analysing available information about cyber security threats, synthesising these, and briefing senior government officials with findings and recommendations. The competition relies upon information sources assembled into a briefing pack such as (real) research reports, (real and simulated) online media, (real and simulated) private sector threat analysis, (simulated) classified government intelligence reports, and even a (simulated) television news