Computational Trust examines the human phenomenon of trust as it applies to ‘technical’ fields, such as computer science, Ambent Intelligence, Distributed AI and more recently the Internet of Things. It also ties back the notion of trust reasoning in computational devices to their human counterparts, through soft security and Device Comfort, amongst other things. It’s present, at least in part or in passing, in reputation and recommendation systems, eCommerce, Juman aspects of security, persuasive technologies and other sociotechnical arenas. As it’s been a couple of decades since Computational Trust was born, it’s past time to look at the road to where we are now. This talk will examine, from my personal viewpoint and work, What Computational Trust is, Where it gets used, When it works, and Who it’s for (and Who uses it, not often the same thing!). We’ll touch on the basics, applications, newer areas that have grown from it (like Device Comfort), and current work that aims to examine the (re)applicability of Computational Trust to its roots in humanity.

In November 2014 the world¹s first use of an end-to-end verifiable voting system in a State election took place in the State of Victoria, Australia. A team from the University of Surrey led the development of the verifiability back-end. The core of the system design was the Pret a Voter verifiable voting scheme originally proposed in 2005, but its implementation required a number of significant enhancements, elaborations and new protocols in order to make it workable in practice and meet the election's specific needs, while maintaining the key property of verifiability. In this talk I will describe the development of the system from a proposal in an academic paper through to a production system, and explain the new elements that needed to be introduced. I will also report on the use of the system in the November 2014 State of Victoria election.

This talk looks at the global cybersecurity outlook for 2016-2018 by focusing on the latest breaches and how these are driving the evolution of compliance and security laws & standards worldwide. It also looks at latest and upcoming technologies and best practices allowing organizations to prevent security incidents from happening and to prepare for dealing with any potential incidents. Mathieu Gorge, winner of the 2015 Executive Awards “Information Security CEO of the Year” will share his insights and experience on the outlook for cybersecurity over the next three years.

As the protection and defence of computational systems and networks becomes more complex, innovative solutions need to be found to generate effective countermeasures. One such approach is to look to nature, to be inspired by natural mechanisms which achieve the kind of protections which we wish to achieve in the digital domain. This has led to the development of a nature inspired technique termed an “Artificial Immune System”. These are a collection of algorithms inspired by the function and behaviour of the different cells of the human immune system. The original conception was to develop a computer immune system to fight computer viruses, but these algorithms have now been applied to a wide range of applications, from network intrusion detection to numerical optimisation, and from evolutionary machine learning to computer art. In this seminar, an exposition of the current state of the art of Artificial Immune Systems in cybersecurity will be given. A particular focus of this talk will be on a current "Discipline Hopping" project developing novel techniques for the automated generation of responses for intrusion detection systems in an Internet of Things context, based on a current collaboration between Computer Science, Immunology and Security Practitioners. 

The automatic exploit generation problem is concerned with the construction of inputs that achieve arbitrary code execution in target applications. The raison d'être is to transition from organic to synthetic exploits by automating the exploit-writing pipeline. Practical applications include making exploitation accessible to non-expert users, establishing bug severity by proving exploitability, and decreasing the level of human effort required in a time-critical environment. In this work, we extend the automatic exploit generation paradigm to include heap-based memory corruption vulnerabilities. This involves reasoning about the target application and as well as the underlying dynamic memory allocator. 

Economists spend a lot of time studying how the market might fail, and how government intervention might restore efficient outcomes. However there are some markets governments would prefer did not exist at all - illicit markets. Economic study of the optimum combination of detection and punishment to deter crime has been undertaken before. An additional tool examined here might be termed disruption, with the aim of encouraging market failure in illicit markets.

The automotive industry has undergone a mayor transformation process where everything from the car key to the vehicle diagnostics became digital. Modern vehicles have several wireless interfaces and are interconnected with various devices and also to the Internet. This connectivity adds great functionality and user friendliness but it also introduces several security and privacy threats. This talk identifies some of the vulnerabilities and main challenges in the complex automotive ecosystem and discusses possible ways forward.

Cybercrime is now a well-established and widely recognised concern, with criminal behaviour probably representing the main driver behind the huge increase in numbers of malicious programs over the last decade or so.  However, while there is no doubt that the problem exists, attempts to quantify cybercrime have resulted in dramatically varied numbers, highlighting the difficulty of trying to establish the scale, cost and impact of attacks. In this presentation, Steven Furnell examines the nature (and potential quality) of the measures currently used to quantify cyber-dependent crime.  He then proceeds to consider the opinions of various security practitioners regarding the potential disconnect between such measurements and the aspects that are potentially more important for us to understand.  The discussion draws upon work conducted as part of a recent Home Office-funded study into the scale, trends and measurement of cyber-dependent crimes.

Cyberspace: a world of great promise, but also, of great peril. Pirates, predators and hackers galore; are you and your online identity at risk in this wild frontier? Maybe... Maybe not... In this talk, I will present some of the research that my colleagues and I in Oxford have conducted on this problem, with the aim of exploring the risks to identity security and privacy in cyberspace. To scope this presentation, I focus especially on the risks in the usage of social media, the exposure of potentially sensitive information in email headers, and how our digital device footprints can be used to make unexpected inferences about our lives and friends.