PhD Studentship: Engendering Safer Online Environments via Threat Discovery and Mitigation, Computer Science - PhD (funded) Ref: 5440

The University of Exeter’s Department of Computer Science is inviting applications for a PhD studentship funded by the Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy to commence on 1 May 2025 or as soon as possible thereafter.  For eligible students the studentship will cover Home or International tuition fees plus an annual tax-free stipend of at least £19,237 for 3.5 years full-time.  The student would be based in Exeter in the Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy at the Streatham Campus.

Project Description

We are looking for a PhD candidate to conduct advanced research on novel cyber-security and privacy mechanisms for mitigating adversarial influence in digital settings. Statistics estimate that more than 402.74 million terabytes of data are created daily. Such data often contains both explicit and implicit forms of personally identifiable information. However, due the complexity of such data, sharing the data presents a wide attack surface.

While several works have studied mechanisms for identifying and mitigating such threats, incidents such as FortiManager 7.x and Transport London’s Oyster Card Saga, bring to the fore a spectrum of application-security and privacy threats including broken access control, insecure designs, security misconfigurations, identification and authentication failures. Therefore, there is a need to better understand how we can protect existing applications and systems to foster safer digital environments.

The objective of this PhD project is to address cyber-security and privacy challenges that emerge with vulnerabilities such as CVE-2021-36934 in relation to multimodal data and the implications of such cyber-security vulnerabilities on data privacy. We aim to propose novel approaches for identifying such vulnerabilities, as well as usage behaviours that enable their exploitation to provoke online harms as well as threats to privacy, and design decision support algorithms to mitigate such harms.

The studentship will be awarded on the basis of merit and is open to both home and international applicants.

International applicants need to be aware that they will have to cover the cost of their student visa, healthcare surcharge and other costs of moving to the UK to do a PhD.

The conditions for eligibility of home fees status are complex and you will need to seek advice if you have moved to or from the UK (or Republic of Ireland) within the past 3 years or have applied for settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme. 

Entry requirements

Applicants for this studentship must have obtained, or be about to obtain, a UK 1 (First) or UK 2:1 (Upper Second Class) Honours degree, or the equivalent qualifications gained outside the UK, in an appropriate area of Computer Science, Digital Engineering, or Cyber-security.

If your qualifications are not from a UK university, you should check our international entry requirements page to see if your qualification meet the requirements for the PhD in Computer Science.

If English is not your first language you will need to meet the English language requirements and provide proof of proficiency. Click here for more information

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