Senior Research Associates: SCULI: Security in Ultra-Large Scale Systems (4 Posts)

We seek to appoint 4 (eventually 5) post-doctoral research associates at Lancaster University forming a research team to explore and develop fundamental new concepts/techniques to provide for and to assess security in ultra-large scale distributed and networked systems.

Lancaster University is part of a 5-year £6.3 million EPSRC Programme Grant on “Securing Convergent Ultra-large Scale Infrastructures” conducted jointly with the Universities of Bristol and Oxford along with international collaborations such as CMU, Duke University, Academia-Sinica, RISE, and industry partners such as BT, HP, Airbus, BAE and Vodaphone.

The classical notions of static architectures and security provisioning assuming fully trusted components are increasingly disconnected with reality. Emerging global-scale infrastructures are highly interconnected, dynamic, often structureless and geared towards delivering on-demand systems and services. There is a need for a paradigm shift away from the idealistic vision of security-by-design to the reality of securing-a-compromised-system. Securing ultra-large scale infrastructures requires novel and transformative scientific advances in (i) defining dynamic security goals along with measures of security “goodness”, (ii) composing security policies and controls across a diverse range of legacy and non-legacy systems, (iii) ascertaining runtime security assurances, and (iv) orchestrating strategies for systemwide coordinated incidents response. Correspondingly, our themes of research interest for the positions are:

Security Compositions 

• How to elicit, specify and validate security assurances for service composition in the presence of uncertainty? 
• Compose and orchestrate security provision and/or security controls across diverse and heterogeneous evolving infrastructures.
• Identifying what trade-offs between security and other metrics exist when composing potentially compromised systems and identify how to decide which of these trade-offs are acceptable.
• Continual Assessment of Security Assurance 
• Develop monitoring, logging and auditing mechanisms to support run-time identification of system state and security violations. 
• Develop techniques for transitioning local state information into global system awareness for conducting runtime assurance analysis.
• Develop mechanisms to reason about the security state at local/global system levels and runtime deployment of threat mitigation schemas.

Coverage across multiple themes is very welcome though please indicate your primary theme of interest in the application.

This is a great opportunity for an individual to build a research career with diverse opportunities to (a) collaborate/network with leading international academic and industrial research groups including related EPSRC projects and b) build a research agenda on exploring the intricacies of security in ultra-large distributed systems of the future. You will have a chance to further your skills and pave the way for innovative solutions that address the pressing challenges faced by current and especially systems of the future.

Key duties of this post include:

• Conducting original research to provision security in future ultra-large scale systems.
• Developing high quality and impactful publications. 
• Developing collaborations with academic, industry partners and EPSRC projects.

You will have a PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or equivalent with experience in cyber security, distributed systems, theoretical and/or experimental security composition, quantification and/or assurance techniques. 

The School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University offers a highly inclusive and stimulating environment for career development, and you will be exposed to a range of further opportunities over the course of this post. We are committed to family-friendly and flexible working policies, as well as the Athena SWAN Charter, which recognises and celebrates good employment practice undertaken to address gender equality in higher education and research.

The expected start date for this role is October 2024.

You will join us on an indefinite contract, however, the role remains contingent on external funding, which for these roles initially ends after 24 months (with the possibility to extend further)

The candidates will be working under the direct supervision of Prof. Neeraj Suri (neeraj.suri@lancaster.ac.uk)  and Dr. Matthew Bradbury (m.s.bradbury@lancaster.ac.uk). Enquiries are welcome!

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Please note: unless specified otherwise in the advert, all advertised roles are UK based.

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