Keynote Speaker

Awais Rashid

University of Bristol, UK 

Biography: Awais Rashid is Professor of Cyber Security at University of Bristol where he heads the Cyber Security Group. He is editor-in-chief and principal investigator for CyBOK, the Cyber Security Body of Knowledge. He is also Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security and Director of the National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online (REPHRAIN). His research interests are in security and privacy of large connected infrastructures, with a particular focus on cyber-physical systems, software security and human factors. He is leading a multi-year programme of research on securing convergent ultra-large-scale infrastructures. 

Title:  Securing Ultra-large Scale Infrastructures: Challenges and Opportunities 

Abstract:  Digital infrastructures are seeing convergence and connectivity at unprecedented scale. This is true for both current critical national infrastructures, such as water, power, and emerging future systems that are highly cyber-physical in nature with complex intersections between humans and technologies, e.g., smart cities, intelligent transportation, high-value manufacturing and Industry 4.0. Diverse legacy and non-legacy software systems underpinned by heterogeneous hardware compose on-the-fly to deliver services to millions of users with varying requirements and unpredictable actions. This complexity is compounded by intricate and complicated supply-chains with many digital assets and services outsourced to third parties. The reality is that, at any particular point in time, there will be untrusted, partially-trusted or compromised elements across the infrastructure. This poses a range of fundamental questions: How does one measure the security state of such infrastructures? What are the complexities of managing security in a landscape shaped by the often competing demands of a variety of stakeholders? How does one secure infrastructures of such complexity or conduct incident response in such ultra-large-scale settings? In this keynote, I will discuss insights from a multi-year programme of research investigating these issues and the challenges to addressing them.