Welcome to the Advanced Cyber Security Engineering Research Centre at the University of Newcastle.

It is clear that the internet is transforming the way we live and the recent decades have witnessed dramatic developments in information and communication technologies.

Along with the phenomenal growth in technology enabled information economy has been a growth in computing technology related crimes. By almost any reasonable standard, the lack of security and privacy on the Internet is no longer at socially acceptable levels.

From consumer threats such as identity theft, to enterprise threats such as the loss of personally identifiable information data, to government threats, there is little doubt that sophisticated adversaries are causing malicious effects.

These are posing fundamental challenges in the design and management of secure, trustworthy and dependable networked systems and applications.

Issues that have become key priorities in this information driven economy include:

  • how does one user trust another user or a service provider over the Internet?
  • how can we design systems that are trustworthy and dependable?
  • how can we capture dynamic changes in policies?
  • how can we provide a trust enhanced experience for users to enjoy, enabling them to make more reliable and effective decisions online?

The overall aim of the Advanced Cyber Security Engineering Research Centre (ACSRC) is to achieve fundamental advances in the theory, design and management of models and techniques that will enable secure and dependable computing information systems and services.

An important characteristic of ACSRC is its research capabilities and expertise covering both theory and practice in addressing the challenges that arise in achieving secure systems in a heterogeneous mobile distributed environment involving distributed systems, wireless, broadband and peer to peer networks, mobile devices and distributed information services.

Currently we have research projects in the areas of Cloud Security, Secure Virtualization, Internet of Things Security, Big Data Security, Trusted Computing, Software Defined Networks Security, Malware and Security Attacks, Data Analytics for Malware Analysis, Secure Systems Design, Peer to Peer Applications, Formal Security Techniques and Applied Cryptography.

A key feature of security research is its multi-faceted nature with security acting as a thread that sews multiple technologies, applications, models and polices together.

It is increasingly evident that challenges do not come in self-contained neat packages (be they in healthcare or intelligent transportation or finance or e-commerce) and it is critical for research in technology and policy should go hand in hand to deal with complexity and inter-dependability and achieve the desired outcomes.

We look forward to interacting and working with you in tackling the challenges in security, trust and privacy in the information age.