I’m a Chair in System Security at the Newcastle University‘s School of Computing, in the Secure and Resilient Systems group. I’m the Director of the Newcastle Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR) [Brochure] and the Newcastle University Centre of Research Excellence in Cyber Security & Resilience.

My main research project right now is on the ERC Starting Grant Confidentiality-Preserving Security Assurance (CASCAde). The main idea of this endeavor is that we can certify the topology of complex systems or graph-like data structures in such a way that we can convince others of their security properties without giving the game away by disclosing sensitive information.

Our main tools for this research are graph signature schemes, that is, digital signature schemes that can sign graphs while keeping their mathematical structure (vertices, edges, labels) accessible to a wide range of zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge. Examples of such schemes exit in SRSA settings as well as bilinear-maps settings.