RESEARCH PROGRAMMES

CSIT currently has 90 staff comprising academic researchers and a significant engineering, professional services and commercial team with deep domain expertise in cyber, driving innovation activities and making it one of the largest centres of its kind in the UK.

Significant research programmes to date have included:

• IQN Hub- The £20.8M ESPRC-funded Integrated Quantum Networks hub commences in December 2024 as part of the UK government’s national quantum strategy.  The project (led by Heriot Watt University) comprises 15 partner universities with CSIT’s Dr Ciara Rafferty as Assistant Director. CSIT will contribute hybrid and post-quantum cryptography solutions to secure future networks.
• The Rolls Royce Cybersecurity Technology Research Network, which includes just three research centres worldwide, CERIAS at Purdue University, CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University and CSIT at QUB.
• The UK Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems (RISE: ukrise.org), funded by EPSRC and the NCSC and led by Professor Máire O’Neill.
• SAFEcrypto (2014-2018) – Worth €3.8m and led by Professor Máire O’Neill, this was the first major EU Horizon 2020 project to be co-ordinated in Northern Ireland. The consortium of 8 partners focused on developing secure architectures for future emerging cryptography.
• CAPRICA and COSMIC – Led by Professor Sakir Sezer and Dr Kieran McLaughlin, core projects in the UK Research Institute in Trustworthy Inter-connected Cyber-physical Systems (RITICS).
• XANDER (2021-2023) – This €5m EU Horizon 2020 project with a consortium of 11 partners, including CSIT, focused on delivering a mature software toolchain for rapid prototyping of interoperable and autonomous embedded systems.
• The Security, Privacy, Identity and Trust Engagement NetworkPlus (SPRITE+), led by the University of Manchester, in partnership with CSIT at QUB, Imperial College London, the University of Southampton and Lancaster University.

ACADEMIC IMPACT

Over the years CSIT has produced impressive research that has truly had an impact in the cyber security industry. Since 2019 CSIT staff have collectively published >170 peer reviewed international journal publications in the top quartile with an overall average Field-Weighted Citation Index (FWCI) of 2.14 (sourced from SciVal).

Examples of research outputs that have received awards include:

• ‘Understanding the security implications in O-RAN with abusive adversaries’, M. Megarry, A. Masaracchia, M. Fahim, V. Sharma, T.Q. Duong, awarded best paper at the 10th EAI International Conference on Industrial Networks and Intelligent Systems, Feb 2024.
• ‘Optimising Vulnerability Triage in DAST with Deep Learning’ S. Millar, D. Podgurskii, D. Kuykendall, J. Martinez del Rincon, P. Miller, awarded best paper at the 15thh ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security, 2022.
• ‘Bearz Attack Falcon: Implementation Attacks with Countermeasures on the Falcon signature scheme’ S. McCarthy, J. Howe, N. Smyth, S. Brannigan, M. O’Neill, awarded best paper at the 17th International Conference on Security and Cryptography (SECRYPT 2019), 2019.
• ‘Investigating Adversarial Attacks on Network Intrusion Detection Systems in SDNs’, J. Aiken, S. Scott-Hayward, awarded best paper at IEEE Conference on NFV-SDN, Dallas, Texas, November 2019.
• ‘STPA-SafeSec: ‘Safety and security analysis for cyber-physical systems’, I. Friedberg, K. McLaughlin, P. Smith, D. Laverty and S. Sezer, Elsevier Journal of Information Security and Applications, June 2017, received the Dr. KW Wong Best Paper Award 2018, selected on the grounds of originality and impact from the publications of 2016–2018.
• ‘Optimised Multiplication Architectures for Accelerating Fully Homomorphic Encryption’, X. Cao, C. Moore, M. O’Neill, E. O’Sullivan, N. Hanley, IEEE Transactions on Computers, September 2016, chosen as IEEE Transactions on Computers ‘Editor’s pick of the year 2016’.
• ‘Pre-Processing Power Traces with a Phase-Sensitive Detector’, Hodgers, P, Hanley, N, O’Neill, M, awarded best paper at the IEEE International Symposium on Hardware-Oriented Security and Trust (HOST), pp. 131-136, Austin, Texas, June 2013.
• ‘FPGA Implementations of the Round Two SHA-3 Candidates’, Baldwin, B, Byrne, A, Lu, L, Hamilton, M, Hanley, N, O’Neill, M, Marnane, W.P, 20th International Conference on Field Programmable Logic and Applications, (FPL 2010), pp.400-407, Italy, August 2010.
  In 2015, to celebrate 25 years of the International Conference on Field-programmable Logic & Applications (FPL) this paper was recognised as one of the top 27 papers over the 25 year history of the conference ‘deemed to have most strongly influenced theory and practice in the field’.