Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Mobile Phone Forensics

The Information Security Group (ISG) at Royal Holloway, University of London, is seeking a highly motivated postdoctoral research fellow for the EU Horizon2020-funded EXFILES project. The successful candidates will join the Smart Card and IoT Security Centre (SCC), of the ISG, supporting the SCC research activities related to mobile phone forensics. The position is fixed term full-time.

Application closing date: 08 October 2020.

Full description: https://jobs.royalholloway.ac.uk/vacancy.aspx?ref=0720-153-R

Keynote Talk

Professor Konstantinos Markantonakis delivered an invited keynote talk on the “Big Data in Cyber Security 2019” event organized by Napier University. More information about the event and the program can be found here.

World Economic Forum

The Smart Card and IoT Security Centre (SCC) team is actively engaged in a joint project with the World Economic Forum (WEF). The SCC team was approached for their expert advice in order to collaborate on the development of an open government procurement system: “Smart Contract-based Digital Procurement System in Colombia”. The project, initiated by the WEF team along with US universities and the country of Colombia, aims at designing a system that provides transparency to the tendering framework and processes, and enables an open/fair auditing mechanism on the blockchain.

PhD Graduation

PhD Graduation

In 2018, we celebrated the successful completion of four PhD students, supervised by Prof Konstantinos Markantonakis and the Smart Card and IoT Security Centre (SCC). They are:

  • Dr Carlton Shepherd, “Techniques for Establishing Trust in Modern Constrained Sensing Platforms with Trusted Execution Environments”
  • Dr Iakovos Gurulian, “On Enhancing the Security of Time Constrained Mobile Contactless Transactions”
  • Dr Robert Lee, “Schemes and Applications for Binding Hardware and Software in Computing Devices”
  • Rashedul Hassan, “Cheat Detection and Security in Video Games”

Well done to them!

At the same time, the SCC is expanding its research efforts in its established research threads, including payment systems, automotive, blockchain and smart contracts, and secure application execution. We are looking for hard working and ambitious PhD candidates to join our research team.

Patent and commercialization

Prof Konstantinos Markantonakis, Dr Raja Naeem Akram and Mr James Tapsell, worked successfully into the creation of a patent as a “Technique to record an event and its impact on the data during the lifetime of a data – specific to individual entities represented in the data.” The implementation helps in serving General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rights: Right to Access, Right to Forget, and Right to Rectification (with evidence).

RHUL has invested in further business analysis around the commercialisation opportunities of the technique developed at SCC. Furthermore, it has invested in building a commercial grade implementation of an MVP, in order to provide the stepping stone for commercialising the aforementioned patent.

CyberASAP

CyberASAP

Professor Konstantinos Markantonakis, Dr Raja Akram and Dr Jorge Blasco Alis from ISG, are leading three projects having secured awards under the Innovate UK Cyber security academic start-up accelerate programme (CyberASAP). This programme provides funding to increase the amount of academic research being commercialised by UK universities through a bespoke programme of support.

Starting this April, with support from industry experts, national Knowledge Transfer Networks (KTNs) and the Research and Enterprise Department at our College, the teams will take part in a 4-month value proposition building activity.  This will include a boot camp, programme review and followed by pitching to an independent, expert judging panel.  If successful, the teams will progress to phase 2 of the programme, gaining support to identify the best commercial route to build a minimal viable product.

Three teams will be taking forward the following projects:

Professor Konstantinos Markantonakis will lead ‘Transparent Compliance’, a project that will develop technology that holistically generates real time analysis of the security and privacy compliance of an organisation.

Dr Raja Akram will lead ‘AISecure’, a project that will develop technologies consisting of novel tools able to evaluate the security and privacy resilience of an AI algorithm against a comprehensive set of threat vectors.  It will also provide digital forensics tools for AI algorithms to ascertain and investigate cyber-attacks and decision making bias.

Dr Jorge Blasco Alis will lead ‘BLEmap: Security for Bluetooth Low Energy Enabled Applications’. BLEmap will help companies to develop secure Internet of Things (I0T) devices that communicate using Bluetooth Low Energy.

For more information on this, and similar funding schemes to support research commercialisation, please contact Fay Kassibawi, Technology Transfer Manager in the Research and Enterprise Department by email, or on 01784 276086.

Smart Card and IoT Security Centre Open Day 2019

Smart Card and IoT Security Centre Open Day 2019

The ISG Smart Card and IoT Security Centre Open-Day 2019 marks the 17th anniversary of the Smart Card Centre. It will be held in the Picture Gallery at Royal Holloway, and acts as a relaxed networking and exhibition event for its sponsors, supporters and industry representatives. There will also be VIP guests and students in attendance (some of whom will be looking for jobs).

This year’s event will be held in memory of Professor Mike Walker, who help to set up the Smart Card Centre in 2002. We really hope you can support us and we look forward to welcoming you in August.

The event is held biannually and comprises a mix of exhibits from our students and industry/organisations. There is also a distinguished guest lecture by Prof Steve Babbage, Vodafone Group. Our Open Days include practical demonstrations and lectures from recognised experts. A buffet lunch and refreshments will be provided.

To attend this event, please click here to get your free ticket.

Quote from Professor Konstantinos Markantonakis, Director of the Smart Card and IoT Security Centre:

“The SCC Open Day was once again a great success attracting more than 100 visitors and 8 exhibiting companies. Our twenty-eight Undergraduate, Master and PhD student posters included topics from drone security, trusted execution environments, automotive security, Internet-of-Things (IoT), smart home and e-health, trusted supply chains, carbon labelling, as well as overall application/system security solutions. All our students demonstrated professionalism, commitment and expertise that was widely recognised by all visitors. Their hard work is leading into academic publications and commercialisation activities. This year’s event was held in memory of Professor Mike Walker, who help to set up the Smart Card Centre in 2002 and demonstrated that the SCC research and commercialization activities maintain their highly respected academic and real world significance.”

Agenda:

09:00 ~ Registration/Coffee
10:00 ~ Introduction and Welcome to the Event
* Welcome to Royal Holloway: Prof. Paul Layzell (Principal)
* Welcome to the Open-Day: Prof. Konstantinos Markantonakis (Director of the SCC)
10:20 ~ Exhibition Morning Session Start
12:00 ~ Buffet Lunch Start
13:00 ~ Exhibition Afternoon Session Start
14:30 ~ Exhibition Awards Ceremony
15:00 ~ Guest Lecture (Main Lecture Theatre), in the memory of Prof. Mike Walker
* Introduction by Prof. Keith Mayes and TBC
* Guest Speaker: Prof. Steve Babbage (Vodafone Group) (see description below)
16:00 ~ Speaker thanks and closing remarks from Prof. Konstantinos Markantonakis

Guest Lecture, Steve Babbage (Vodafone Group): “The History of Mobile Network Security”

This lecture is a tribute to Professor Mike Walker (1947 – 2018).  Steve will talk about the history and motivation behind different generations of mobile network security, including the roles played by Mike and by Royal Holloway.

Exhibitors List:

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Gallery:

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Student best poster awards

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ISG SCC Workshop 2018

On the 1st of November 2018, the ISG SCC Workshop 2018 showcased the excellent work carried out by its summer internship recipient students of the 2017-2018 academic year. The SCC provided the necessary funding and had the privilege of collaborating with eleven amazing undergraduate (UG) Computer Science students investigating a range of topics including data provenance, machine/deep learning, visualisation, blockchain, smart contracts, e-voting, syscall and database monitoring.

The ISG SCC undergraduate internship programme is designed to provide a first-hand experience of research and development at the highest level, by enabling undergraduate students to work with experienced researchers on real world problems related to cybersecurity and privacy.

The ISG SCC staff provides support and direction in selecting a real world research question, co-developing it, finding the core issues that need to be tackled and propose realistic solutions. The programme has a significant active research and programming (development) component, along with extensible emphasis towards exploring commercialisation opportunities.

During the workshop, each intern delivered a soundbite talk summarising their work, the skills they gained and the challenges they had to overcome during the 10 week programme.

Results

  • All projects achieved their identified objectives.
  • One proposal is already in the commercialisation stage (by RHUL).
  • Four papers accepted (published) in international conferences; another paper is under submission and a journal paper under development.

Responsible Disclosure: XiongMai uc-httpd 1.0.0 – Buffer Overflow

As part of his MSc Project, Andrew Watson discovered a previously unknown buffer overflow vulnerability in ‘XiongMai uc-httpd 1.0.0’ – a web server used in multiple IoT devices including routers, CCTV cameras and DVR’s. Following best practice and with the full support of RHUL ISG, he attempted responsible disclosure to assist XiongMai in fixing the vulnerability, but unfortunately the company did not respond to any of the multiple attempts to discuss the vulnerability with them. After 111days of no responses, he released the 0day exploit publicly, further details available here.

The vulnerability (CVE ID: CVE-2018-10088) has since been given a CVSS score of 10.0 – the highest any vulnerability can score.

Andrew’s Proof of Concept exploit (PoC) was accepted to the Offensive Security Exploit Database as EDB-ID: 44864 and is also included in Kali Linux via the SearchSploit tool.

Soon after the PoC exploit was publicly released, it was reported that the Satori Botnet integrated the PoC exploit into their botnet code. Quoting Security Affairs: “The code recently included in the Satori botnet exploits a buffer overflow vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-10088, in XionMai uc-httpd 1.0.0. The exploit could be used by remote attackers to execute arbitrary code by sending a malformed package via ports 80 or 8000.”

The vulnerability was also reported by Bleeping Computer: “The sudden surge in port 8000 activity turned the heads of multiple security experts specialized in botnet tracking, as it came out of nowhere and at an incredible scale”.