RHUL Cyber CDT Blog

On June 29th and 30th, Royal Holloway’s CDT in Cyber Security for the Everyday was delighted to host colleagues from the cyber security CDTs based in Bath/Bristol and UCL for the annual Inter-CDT Summer Conference. This conference series is student-led and student-organised, with this year’s conference theme being Making Connections. Making Connections is an important aspect of the PhD journey for each CDT student, since researchers are not only expected to make connections with students from their own cohort and other cohorts, but also make connections between the many different facets of cyber security that have relevance to their specific research projects. This typically also involves making connections with individuals from other organisations, including other CDTs, which is precisely what the Inter-CDT Summer School facilitates. The conference was excellent planned, with a real mix of activities and formats. Day one began with an ice-breaking activity which immediately enabled co...

This past month, we flew to Oregon to attend the 2023 Oregon Programming Languages Summer School. OPLSS was over two weeks, with the two Sundays free. The lectures were an hour and a half, 4 times a day. The first week lent more heavily into the maths behind languages and proofs over languages with lectures on the Lambda cube, proof theory, logical relations and Category theory. The second week was more about the use of the previous week's content for topics such as program analysis, verified compilation and program synthesis. There were also 3 participant talk sessions where other participants gave talks on their own research areas. These talks gave a really interesting opportunity to hear about what current MSc and PhD students are working on, and led to some very interesting discussions all round! Thanks to these talks, as well as general chats throughout the fortnight, OPLSS was an amazing opportunity to meet other early stage researchers and industry folk working in related ar...

It has been just over a year since I successfully completed my viva – a milestone that initially felt both terrifying and insurmountable when I first joined the CDT. Now, I have the privilege of reflecting on my PhD journey and how its opportunities have shaped my present. I also wish to inspire curious students to embrace the full potential of the CDT and similar programs.   When I first came across the CDT application form, I initially envisioned transforming from a disillusioned city worker into a technical cyber security wizard, focusing on governance or incident response – as those were the only cyber security functions I was familiar with at the time. Very quickly, the CDT taught me that cyber security encompasses a vast and comprehensive range of approaches, offering me a holistic perspective on the field. Supported by the CDT, I engaged with exciting research and practitioner communities to learn about security governance, feminist and critical approaches, geography, the ph...

 At the end of May 2023, a group from the Royal Holloway CDT attended the 2023 edition of CyCon in the Estonian capital, Tallinn. CyCon – the International Conference on Cyber Conflict – is organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE), which is based in Estonia. The Royal Holloway CDT has a strong tradition of attending CyCon and of working with the CCDCOE. Some of this year’s group also attended in 2022 – you can find a write-up of that trip here :  The theme of the conference was ‘Meeting Reality’ – a phrase that perhaps reflected the continuing impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The talks covered a wide range of policy, legal, and technical aspects of cyber conflict. A highlight for us was attending the talk given by Royal Holloway’s own Andrew Dwyer on the evolution of the UK’s concept of cyber power. In between talks, CyCon served up an insight into the intersection of the academic, military, and government circles. Technical special...

Rights Con is an international conference which brings conversations on the intersection of digital and human rights together, as described on their website it is, 'The world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age.' Originating as the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference in 2011, Rights Con in 2023 is now a community of 8000+ people passionate about the freedom and protection of communities navigating through technological developments.   I was delighted to be selected to participate in the Young Leader's Summit which took place the day before the official conference began. With approximately 30 young people in the room, it was a wonderful opportunity to connect with and learn from other passionate young people working at many different angles of digital rights. The relationships built throughout this session became a foundation for the busy week ahead. The day started with a session by Data 4SDGs to discuss data values followed by the Internet Society who le...

Having now reached the end of the process, this is a good time to reflect upon my CDT and PhD experience as a whole.  I have separated out ‘PhD’ from ‘CDT’ for a reason. The CDT approach of a first year of learning within a cohort environment offers many advantages compared to a PhD solo venture. The interaction with fellow cohort members, and the ability to experiment with other areas of cybersecurity that I wouldn’t otherwise have gone anywhere near, provided an experience that I believe is far more valuable than just the PhD research portion alone.  Something I didn’t consider was how it would feel to actually finish the programme. By the time my viva arrived, I had already been in work for a number of months. Passing the viva was a strange experience – whilst it was somewhat anticlimactic (probably due to the fact I hadn’t been working fulltime on my PhD in the run-up), something certainly felt different. It took a few minutes sitting in the car for it all to sink in! ...

 I have recently travelled to Rome, where I had the opportunity to present the paper AWSomePy: A Dataset and Characterization of Serverless Applications at one of the workshops of the EuroSys 2023 conference. It has certainly been a positive experience, despite the odd feeling of being – for the first time ever – in my home country for work! The 1st SESAME workshop touched several aspects of Serverless Computing, my area of study, and it was very interesting, despite not having a focus on security. The organization of the event was very good, and I must say that I have particularly appreciated that the proceedings were published online on the day of the workshop, without having to wait for weeks. My talk, which described the characterization work recently done with my supervisory team on the new dataset AWSomePy , was rightly included in the session Understand What You Optimize, and went reasonably well. I had a couple of questions, which gave me food for thoughts and – at the sa...

 ACM CHI is a five-day-long top-tier conference on Human-Computer Interaction. This year it was held in Hamburg with over 4000 attendees from 72+ countries. We decided to attend this conference as our research interests revolve around the social foundations of security. Jessica is interested in security practices in post-conflict societies, while Mikaela focuses on perceptions of secure messaging in activist communities. We believed that this conference would provide valuable insights into our respective areas of interest. Our experience at CHI (pronounced ’kai’) was truly amazing, and we found it to be a highly worthwhile conference to attend. With the opening ceremony feeling somewhat like Eurovision, it set the tone for an exciting and eclectic week ahead! The opening keynote prioritised human aspects of cybersecurity, highlighting the growing space for information security researchers within the CHI community. It was the first time for both of us to attend CHI and we were both...

For a lot of us CDT researchers, the past month and a half has been a period of travel and conferences. Soon after we returned from Japan, where we visited the wonderful Real World Crypto (s ee this blog post for more details of the trip), another conference was around the corner. At the end of April, a few of us had the pleasure of attending Eurocrypt 2023 , one of the three main general conferences organised by the IACR, this year organised in Lyon, France. Moreover, the conference was followed by a workshop on post-quantum zero-knowledge proofs in Lausanne, Switzerland, a mere three hour train ride away on the shores of Lake Geneva, which made this trip even more worthwhile, as it almost felt like there was a 2-for-1 sale on cryptography events in Europe.  Eurocrypt was scheduled over five days, from Sunday, April 23, to Thursday, April 27. Once I arrived to Lyon on Sunday afternoon and settled into my accommodation, I headed over to InterContinental Lyon, a short walk away fr...

I am still working on the ‘Summer’ project I started at the end of my training year. Whilst I believe this is a common occurrence in the CDT, it can still be an occasional source of anxiety! Before I explain what’s taken me so long, I’ll quickly explain the project. I worked with my now supervisor, Martin Albrecht, to study Matrix, a protocol for end-to-end encrypted group messaging (think WhatsApp group chats). The protocol has over 80 million users, and is well used among the open source and free software communities as well as several governmental organisations. They have a presence in government organisations within France, Germany and Sweden. This includes healthcare services and, in the case of Germany, their military. Our initial goal was to analyse the protocol. We would study it, precisely define its intended security goals, then determine whether it fulfils those goals. It’s in the final step that we attempt to write a security proof. This would be the first time I would...

 From March 27-29, some of the CDT’s researchers had the opportunity to attend Real World Crypto (RWC) 2023 . RWC moves venue every year, last year being in Amsterdam and next year in Toronto. This year, it was in Tokyo. RWC is focused on bringing together cryptography researchers from academia with developers who implement cryptography in their systems, thus creating open and interesting dialogue between these two communities. Notably, RWC does not publish proceedings from presentations, and talks are solely selected based on how much interest they would be to the intended audience. The talk selection process is not intended to evaluate the academic quality of a piece of research, but rather the potential impact that it would have on society or technology. Therefore, the collection of contributed and invited talks were particularly engaging, with the findings of the different studies having immense current and future impact in the real world. Many of us in the CDT had an interest ...

 The EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cyber Security for the Everyday was delighted to host the return of our annual Showcase as an in-person event at Cumberland Lodge in Great Windsor Park. The CDT funds around ten PhD research studentships each year, with each cohort of researchers undertaking an immersive year of training in cyber security, followed by three years of research. The Showcase welcomed members of the CDT, colleagues at Royal Holloway, and external partners, to learn about some of the fascinating work being undertaken by researchers across the CDT cohorts, and across the many disciplines that relate to cyber security. The opening session featured presentations by several students who have already commenced their studies. Nicola Bates discussed her use of `systems thinking’ to improve the accessibility of knowledge in the cyber domain for key organisational decision makers. Giuseppe Raffa then presented his work on evaluating the effectiveness (sometimes in...

  “Some other countries are struggling, such as Mexico. They need to tackle crime, not cyber security. ” “The price of Chinese technology is much more accessible compared to European or American companies. Paraguay does not produce any technology.” “In Latin America we can confuse some platforms with the internet itself. The experience of going online is through social media apps, this is a challenge.’’ “Latin America is the most peaceful region regarding interstate conflict and most violent in interpersonal conflict and/or violence. We have to shift focus more towards everyday violence and the use of technology to oppress people.’’ These quotes, captured in a workshop held by the Digital Security in Latin America Research Group (DLSA) in December 2022, illustrate a very important (if sometimes overlooked) point: the importance of context. By context we refer essentially to how the digital relates to, shapes, and is shaped by the on-the-ground realities emergent in a specific...