10 YEARS OF IMPACT

CSIT is the UK’s Innovation and Knowledge Centre for cyber security. Based at Queen’s University Belfast and founded in 2009, our mission, to couple major research breakthroughs in the field of secure information technologies with a unique model of innovation and commercialisation to drive economic and societal impact for the nation has not wavered since then.

As we predicted, cyber security challenges have grown exponentially in the last decade. A safe and secure cyberspace is fundamental to making the UK the safest place in the world to live and work online.

Cyber security is at the epicentre of privacy and trust in the global digitalised society.

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CSIT PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR Professor Máire O’Neill (FIAE, MRIA) has a strong international reputation for her research in hardware security and applied cryptography. She is Director of the £5M EPSRC/NCSC-funded Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems (RISE: www.ukrise.org) and recently led the €3.8m EU H2020 SAFEcrypto (Secure architectures for Future Emerging Cryptography: www.safecrypto.eu) project (2014–2018).

She previously held a UK EPSRC Leadership Fellowship (2008–2014) and was a former holder of a UK Royal Academy of Engineering research fellowship (2003–2008). She has received numerous awards, which include a Blavatnik Engineering and Physical Sciences medal, 2019, a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, 2014 and British Female Inventor of the Year 2007.

CSIT DIRECTOR Dr Godfrey Gaston is the Director of the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT). He has responsibility for the operational management of the centre and commercialisation and knowledge transfer within an open innovation research environment.

Godfrey graduated with a MEng degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the Queen’s University Belfast, UK followed by a PhD at the University of Edinburgh in the field of Microelectronics and Semiconductors.

She has authored two research books, and over 150 peer-reviewed international conference/journal publications. Professor O’Neill has significant expertise in the design of high-speed and lightweight security architectures, physical unclonable functions (PUFs), side channel analysis and applied quantum-safe cryptography. Her early research into high-speed AES hardware architectures was successfully commercialised by Amphion Semiconductors, Belfast, and utilized to provide security in their set-top box chip sets. Collaborative research with ETRI, South Korea, on a novel security architecture for Electric Vehicle (EV) charging systems was licensed by LG-CNS.

She is an Associate Editor for IEEE TC and IEEE TETC and is secretary of the IEEE Circuits and Systems for Communications Technical committee. She is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering.

He then spent a number of years working for GEC Plessey Semiconductors. Following this role he was recruited as Engineering Manager for a technology start-up, BCO Technologies in Belfast, where he led the development of a new Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS) processing technology, which resulted in the acquisition of BCO by Analog Devices for $153m in 2000. For the next three years Godfrey led the Analog Devices Belfast engineering team.

Godfrey has also completed an MBA from Henley Management College, London and is co-founder of start-up company, Titan IC. Titan IC is a spinout from Queen’s University Belfast.

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DEVELOPING A TALENT PIPELINE CSIT’s success, and that of the cyber security industry, is built on a steady pipeline of talented students and researchers.

Our Masters in Applied Cyber Security is training the next generation of global industry leaders. The course was established in 2014 and fully certified by the UK National Cyber Security Centre in 2017. Since then we have enrolled 107 students from around the world to study here in Belfast.

CSIT’s PhD training programme has graduated 33 PhD students to date. While a large majority of those have been focused on core technology areas we have also pioneered research at the interface between the social sciences and electronic engineering and computer science with our Leverhulme Interdisciplinary Network on Cybersecurity and Society partnership with the The Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice as well as in Financial Services through the Capital Markets Collaborative Network.

Academic Centre of ExcellenceIn Cyber Security Research

Masters in Applied Cyber Security fully certified by the UK National Cyber Security Centre in 2017

107 STUDENTS FROM AROUND THE WORLD ENROLLED SINCE 2017

CSIT’S PhD TRAINING PROGRAMME HAS

GRADUATED 33 PhD STUDENTS TO DATE

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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:

• The £5m UK Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems (RISE), funded by EPSRC and the NCSC and led by Professor Máire O’Neill www.ukrise.org

• SAFEcrypto – Worth €3.8m, this was the first major Horizon 2020 project to be co-ordinated in Northern Ireland – investigated practical post-quantum cryptographic solutions www.safecrypto.eu

• CAPRICA and COSMIC – investigating secure and resilient approaches to trustworthy industrial control systems. Led by Professor Sakir Sezer and Dr Kieran McLaughlin, core projects in the UK Research Institute in Trustworthy Inter-connected Cyber-physical Systems www.ritics.org/caprica

CSIT was one of the first Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research recognised by the NCSC and EPSRC in 2011 with that status retained in the 2016 round assessment.

100% of our research REF results are world-leading or internationally excellent, ranking 5th in the UK for research which is of the highest quality.

ACADEMIC RESEARCH IMPACTOver the years CSIT has produced impressive research that has truly had an impact in the cyber security industry.

Some examples include:

• Paper on ‘Optimised Multiplication Architectures for Accelerating Fully Homomorphic Encryption’, X. Cao, C. Moore, M. O’Neill, E. O’Sullivan, N. Hanley, published in IEEE Transactions on Computers, was chosen as IEEE Trans. on Computers ‘Editor’s pick of the year 2016’

• In 2015, to celebrate 25 years of the International Conference on Field-programmable Logic & Applications (FPL) research into ;FPGA Implementations of the Round Two SHA-3 Candidates’ was awarded as one of 27 papers ‘deemed to have most strongly influenced theory and practice in the field’

• Open-source tools, DELTA (SDN Security Evaluation) and TENNISON (SDN Security Framework), which are used in education and have also generated industry interest, specifically DELTA for testing the security of SDN devices

• Dr. KW Wong Best Paper Award 2018, Elsevier Journal of Information Security and Applications

• STPA-SafeSec: ‘Safety and security analysis for cyber-physical systems’, I. Friedberg, K. McLaughlin, P. Smith, D. Laverty and S. Sezer, Published June 2017; Selected on the grounds of originality and impact from the publications of 2016–2018

5TH IN THE UK FOR HIGH QUALITY

RESEARCH BASED ON REF RESULTS

90 STAFF MAKES USONE OF THE LARGEST CENTRES OF ITS KIND

IN THE UK

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RESEARCH TRANSLATION Industry engagement is at the heart of CSIT. Our unique membership model has seen us develop longstanding advisory and industrial collaborations with global partners including Altera, Allstate, BAE Systems, Cisco, Citi, Direct Line Group, First Derivatives, IBM, Infosys, Intel, McAfee, Roke, Seagate and Thales.

This unique Open Innovation model allows research to translate to industry in an agile way, ensuring demonstrable technology is in the hands of end users quickly. Recent examples include:

• Partnering with BAE Systems on video based semantic analysis of crowd behaviour for the UK Defence and Security Accelerator

• Thales has used our novel Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) technology in a demonstrator for electronic component anti-counterfeiting

• Thales and Dell EMC have both used our practical post-quantum cryptography architectures and software libraries in demonstrators as a first step to commercialisation

• A collaboration with TES Group, led to the discovery of a critical vulnerability affecting critical national infrastructure networks globally. As a result the vendor developed a patch ensuring the vulnerability cannot be exploited by hackers

• We worked with Linz AG, an electrical distribution company in Austria, to reveal several problems and vulnerabilities in Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) networks

• We have developed open source tools for testing the security of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) devices

CREATING NEW VENTURES CSIT Spin-out companies include Affyon, Ditaca, Titan IC, Liopa, Sensurity and Cognition Video, which are delivering new benchmarks for content inspection, visual speech recognition, intrusion detection and platforms for automatic and intelligent image and video processing.

• Titan IC Ltd now employs over 20 staff, has secured £4m investment

• Liopa Ltd now employs 8 staff, has secured over £1m in investment

• Ditaca is developing new retrofit appliance and cloud enabled cyber security solutions for industrial control systems

Our engineering capability is bridging the gap between research and impact, and assist with direct contract innovation with companies. Significant examples include:

• Working with B-Secur to refine the accuracy of their ECG authentication technology

• Developing new mechanisms for carrying out compliance regulations at one of the largest global financial services companies – its first ever engagement with an academic research centre outside the United States

• Collaborating with Allstate to apply cyber security research to the problem of detecting anomalous and fraudulent insurance claims

CAPACITY BUILDING IN INDUSTRY

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INNOVATION Our CSIT Labs experience is now being applied on a truly national scale. CSIT is a delivery partner on the £13.5m UK Government funded London Office for Rapid Cybersecurity Advancement (LORCA) providing academic and engineering support to each cohort at Plexal, the innovation campus based at the Olympic Park.

Furthermore, CSIT is heavily involved in supporting many more companies through the UK Government funded programmes HutZero and Cyber101.

These firms have raised over £20m in private investment:

• B-Secur (£7.5m) • Uleska (£500k)• Liopa (£1m)• Titan IC (£4m) • Cyberlytic (£935k) • Immersive Labs ($8m) • Zonefox (Acquired by Fortinet for $18m) • Circadian Capital (£70k)

CSIT Labs 1• Liopa• Sirona• Cognition Video• B-Secur• CyberLytic

CSIT Labs 2• Cambridge

Authentication Ltd • AutoCan(Coventry)• DITACA (CSIT)• Uleska• Circadian• Immersive Labs

CSIT Labs 3• CyberShield• CyNation• Distributed

Management Systems • Hengistbury Software• Serelay

17 start-ups from across the UK have graduated from the CSIT Labs incubator programme over three cohorts.

London Office for Rapid Cybersecurity Advancement (LORCA)

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A GLOBAL CYBER INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM CSIT has been a critical resource in establishing and promoting Northern Ireland as a leading UK cyber security innovation ecosystem through spin-out commercialisation of research, the scale-up of local and regional businesses and attracting foreign direct investment. CSIT’s regional impact has ensured Northern Ireland is the number one international investment location for US cyber security development projects.

This burgeoning cyber security innovation ecosystem has grown significantly and now numbers 40+ companies employing approximately 1600 cyber security professionals delivering £60M per annum in salaries to the local economy. The cyber security industry supports approximately 750 additional jobs in the wider economy.

The Centre is a founding partner of the Global Ecosystem of Ecosystems Partnership in Innovation and Cybersecurity (Global EPIC) which now counts 28 keystones in 17 countries across North America, Europe, India, Africa, Asia and Oceania as members.

The most powerful innovation happens at the ‘Intersection’, where ideas and concepts from diverse industries, cultures, and disciplines collide. Now in its 9th year, the CSIT World Cyber Security Summit has brought together a select group of over 1000 international cyber security experts from government, industry, entrepreneurs, venture capital, civic society and academia across all events to date. The output from each Summit informs the CSIT research and innovation roadmap.

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Since being established CSIT has worked closely with Government agencies such as the Home Office, DSTL, GCHQ and the NCSC through our advisory board to help shape the technology landscape. Furthermore, our staff have advised local and national government departments on a variety of strategic initiatives and policies in relation to cyber security.

• MATRIX Northern Ireland Science Industry Panel, 2016 Digital ICT Report

• UK Cabinet Office National Cyber Security Strategy 2016 to 2021

• Department of the Economy Industrial Strategy for Northern Ireland

• Department of Finance NI Cyber Security Strategic Framework for Action

• Royal Society Progress and research in cybersecurity: Supporting a resilient and trustworthy system for the UK

• UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) UK Cyber Security Sectoral Analysis 2018 and 2020

• UK Department for International Trade UK Cyber Security Export Strategy

• UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office UN International Cyber Norms GGE and OEWG

• UK Delegation to ITU ITU-T Study Group 17 (Security)

• UK Delegation to ETSI TC Cyber including WG on quantum safe cryptography

• UK Cyber Trade Missions to Washington, Israel, Singapore, India, Vienna

• All-Ireland Cyber Security Group

• Northern Ireland Cyber Leadership Board

• UK Cyber Growth Partnership

SHAPING GOVERNMENT POLICY AND SUPPORTING IT GLOBALLY

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CSIT’s diverse team has had its impact recognised on the national and international stage, including:

• Queens Anniversary Prize 2015 Queens Anniversary Prize 2015 CSIT was honoured by Her Majesty the Queen for its work in strengthening global cyber security

• Professor Máire O’Neill Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists 2019 UK Awards Finalist – Physical Sciences & Engineering

• Dr Niall McLaughlin Finalist in the Mobile World Scholar Challenge at MWC19 in Barcelona for his work on Deep Learning for Mobile Malware Detection

• Professor Sir John McCanny Received Northern Ireland’s only Knighthood in the 2017 New Year’s Honours list in recognition for his services to higher education and economic development

• Professor John McCanny Inaugurated as Northern Ireland’s first Regius Professor in December 2016

• Dr Sandra Scott Hayward Awarded the Outstanding Leadership Award 2016 by the Open Networking Foundation for her work on the Security Working Group

FUNDERS CSIT has been fortunate to have had strong and supportive core funding partnerships with InnovateUK, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Invest Northern Ireland. They have shared our vision and took the bold step of investing in world leading cyber security research harnessed to a strong entrepreneurial team of innovators to deliver impact and a dynamic ecosystem. This has been strategically important in delivering economic impact for Northern Ireland as a region and for the whole of the United Kingdom.

• Athena SWAN Awarded the prestigious Athena SWAN Silver award in recognition of its work to support women in science

• PicoPUF Led by Dr Neil Hanley, Professor Maire O’Neill, and Dr Chongyan Gu, won the 2015 INVENT award grand prize for innovative start-ups

• Professor Maire O’Neill Awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering 2014 Silver Medal, which recognises outstanding personal contribution by an early or mid-career engineer that has resulted in successful market exploitation

• Liopa Led by Dr Darryl Stewart, David Crozier, Dr Fabian Campbell-West and Dr Michael Loughlin won the Software and Digital Media category at the 2013 INVENT Awards

• Professor John McCanny Awarded the Royal Irish Academy’s Cunningham medal (2011), its most prestigious honour

RECOGNITION

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THE FUTURE OF CSIT We have exciting plans for the future under the theme of ‘Secure Connected Intelligence’. Investments in infrastructure are already coming on stream as part of the Belfast City Region deal. We are looking to the East and West, North and South, to build a coalition of partners across the academic, industrial, government and investment communities to build on the core investment to date and cement CSIT’s position as a strategic national asset.

Our own research roadmap features new developments in the areas of:

• Practical privacy preserving technologies• Supply chain security and hardware trojan detection• Resilience in industrial control systems• AI for cyber security• Inconspicuous security through smart network

technologies

Our journey has only started.

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