Research

In a world of “Data is the new oil” where the volume and variety of data are increasing exponentially, most organizations lack a roadmap against which they can measure their effectiveness for using data and analytics to optimize key processes or uncover new business opportunities and deliver an enhanced customer experience. Today, the effectiveness of data has to consider Privacy and Security as fundamentals in establishing Trust, whether it is trust in Data, Trust in Systems or Trust in data Technology.

The research vision of the ISP group is to identify Privacy and security risks and design and build secure and privacy- preserving technologies across the whole data lifecycle for real-world applications.

More specifically, our vision builds on three key building blocks:

  • Demonstrate, identify and quantify risks of privacy and security vulnerabilities in existing systems and data-driven platforms.
  • Deepen understanding of privacy and security issues via abstraction: clearly defining privacy/security goals, adversarial resources, and what it means to achieve these goals.
  • Develop efficient yet secure and privacy-preserving new and alternatives of algorithms and protocols for such abstract models with application to broader real-world problems.

In order to achieve our research vision, our strategy is to leverage world-class expertise from multi-disciplinary research in measurement, theory and practice of security and privacy:

  1. Measure: Developing robust, repeatable methods and tools to measure information leakage and security vulnerabilities of existing systems.
  2. Theorise: Constructing precise mathematical definitions of privacy and security, threat models with formally defined adversarial resources and threat models, and methods to quantify information leaked in interacting distributed systems. This also includes constructing theoretical attacks on current systems and proposing fixes to these systems.
  3. Develop: Developing algorithms and protocols that have strong guarantees of privacy/security and are efficient enough to be deployed in practice.

If you would like to learn more about some of the pioneering, world leading technologies, check-out our Projects pages.