Tag: cyber security

Transatlantic cyber contest sees success for UWE Falcons students

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

ROWE CTF 11th May 2024:

The inaugural Rowan University and UWE Bristol (ROWE) Catch the Flag (CTF) saw students from both UWE Bristol and Rowan University, Delaware, New Jersey partake in a series of CTF challenges. From exploiting vulnerable service, solving cryptographic conundrums, analysing pcaps, digital forensics images to an open-source intelligence challenge where students were tasked with finding out as much information as they could from a single image.

UWE Bristol have established a strong collaborative partnership with Rowan University. Professor Fred Stinchcombe is Head of Cyber Security at Rowan University and UWE Bristol alumni from the 1990’s, who has worked with Professor Phil Legg and student representative Ian Caple to develop collaborative programme of events, and a shared online Discord community.

To this end UWE Bristol CTF Falcons challenged their counterparts on the other side of the pond to a CTF, designed by UWE’s technical team on this occasion (Alan Mills, Jon White and Ian Caple).

The event saw students beavering away tackling what was a considerable array of challenges in a race to capture as many flags as possible. UWE CTF Falcons student Mohamed Almarri (MSc Cyber Security) was successful in capturing the most number of flags on this occasion.

We look forward to many more international challenges with the students at Rowan University, as well as other universities throughout the UK.

UWE Bristol Capture The Flag Falcons take flight

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

By Ian Caple, MSc Cyber Security student (September 2023 cohort)

Saturday 24th of Febuary saw the birth of a new student-led cyber security initiative, UWE Bristol Capture The Flag Falcons (CTF). Students from across the school of computer science came together to take part in a CTF competition. Undergrads and Postgrads alike took part in a series of cyber security related challenges from Web exploration, cryptography, digital forensic challenges such as hacking veracrypt containers.

In teams of 2 or 3, students battled their way through a series of challenges, hacking their way in ir exploiting vulnerabilities to gain access to areas they shouldn’t be to find the flags.

17 students in all took part giving UWE CTF Falcons a great starting point for the future of the Falcons. After 8 eventful hours that saw every team overcome multiple challenges the CTF challenge was won by The Phishermen – 3rd year BSc Cyber Security and Digital Forensics students Harvey Keane, Callum Duncan and Ash Floyd, who captured a staggering 13 of 15 flags.

But the real winners was everyone who took part and can say they were they when UWE CTF Falcons took flight.

A huge thank you and honourable mention needs to go to our teaching staff Alan Mills and Jon White for helping us set up the challenges and making the day as much fun as it was!

UWEcyber students and CyberWomen@UWE support Cynam EmPowerCyber to inspire 1000 year 8 schoolgirls

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

The recent “EmpowerCyber 2023” cyber outreach event, hosted by Cynam in Gloucester was attended by 1000 Year 8 schoolgirls from across the region and supported by 30 different industry partners.

The event aims to ignite curiosity and empower young girls to explore the incredible opportunities in the world of cyber security, opportunities they may not have otherwise considered. This works towards addressing the UK’s digital skills gap and striving for better female representation in the cyber workforce.

The UWECyber team, supported by our BSc Cyber Security and Digital Forensics, and MSc Cyber Security students, hosted a “Future Funfair” event. The event uses Lego-based funfair rides to where simulated attacks on cyber physical systems can be investigated and mitigated against by the students. These scenarios bring to life the importance of cybersecurity in everyday technology, from safeguarding personal data to protecting national infrastructure.

The CyberWomen@UWE

Additionally the CyberWomen@UWE group provided a cryptography-based murder mystery event. This challenging and exciting activity immersed the girls in the world of digital sleuthing, decrypting messages, and solving cyber puzzles. It was a powerful demonstration of how cyber skills can be applied in creative and critical thinking scenarios.

The involvement of 30 different industry partners was instrumental in the success of EmpowerCyber 2023. Their contributions offered valuable insights into the real-world applications of cyber and STEM skills, showcasing a wide array of career possibilities in these fields. This industry collaboration also highlighted the growing need for skilled professionals in the cybersecurity sector.

The UWE Cyber team
Supporting the students

Through initiatives like EmpowerCyber 2023, cyber outreach activities play critical role in reducing the gender gap in STEM and cyber fields. By capturing the interest of young girls at a crucial stage in their education, this event has laid the groundwork for nurturing a generation of empowered, cyber-aware women ready to take on the challenges of tomorrow’s tech landscape.

South West Cyber Resilience Centre launch our new academic year of UWEcyber guest seminars

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

This week saw the launch of our UWEcyber guest seminar series for the new academic year. Each week we invite guests from industry, government and academia to talk with our students about the latest developments in the cyber security landscape.

This week, we welcomed Mark Moore from the South West Cyber Resilience Centre (SWCRC), a initiative set up to bring policing and academia together to support regional SMEs to upskill in cyber security.

SWCRC provides a fantastic opportunity for our students to be part of a network beyond the University, to work with students from across the UK, and to help SMEs that may not necessarily be tech savvy improve their posture against cyber attacks.

The SWCRC provides paid opportunities for occasional work, that would compliment at UWE Bristol. We have seen UWE Bristol students be successful in applying for this scheme in previous years, and we are keen to ensure that this success continues. For more details, please visit: South West Cyber Resilience Centre SWCRC

UWE Bristol researchers conduct first longitudinal study on evolving vulnerabilities in cloud and application security 

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

A team of UWE Bristol researchers have conducted a major new study into the evolving security landscape of modern cloud infrastructures. The study, recently published in the Computers and Security journal, investigates container security for over 400 applications and services over a 9-month period, to assess what the security vulnerabilities of these services are, and the frequency of when these vulnerabilities are resolved. The findings show many cases where vulnerabilities remain persistent even when updated versions of the application are released. However, we also investigate the real-world nature of these vulnerabilities, to assess the true risk of utilising these services in both local and remote settings, recognising that whilst some security scans may highlight a vulnerability, the vulnerability can not actually be exploited given the use case of the application. 

Alan Mills, lead author of the study says “Container security is a growing area of concern, with the increasing use of micro-services we need to ensure that cyber security keeps pace, while avoiding common pit falls around vulnerability assessment. By assessing container security over an extended time-period and analysing our results from multiple areas, all with a focus on real world risk, we present findings which inform further academic studies and industry-based decision making.”

The study was conducted in collaboration with Jonathan White and Professor Phil Legg. Alan is currently a Lecturer in Cyber Security studying for a part-time DPhil on the topic of container and cloud security.

The paper, Longitudinal risk-based security assessment of docker software container images, is now available as Open Access from the Computers and Security journal.

Cybersecurity Outreach for Young Minds: UWE Bristol’s Annual Unlock Cyber Taster Day for Schools

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

By Jonathan White, Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security

Last month, UWE Bristol was proud to host the annual Unlock Cyber Taster Day. Taking place in the School of Engineering building on the Frenchay campus, the day was attended by approximately 350 students aged 12 to 14 from schools across the region.

The event was run by Unlock Cyber, an employer-led initiative established by UWE Bristol to build a community of young cyber security enthusiasts with the right skills to follow a career into the sector. 12 industry partners come together for the day to provide a wide range of cyber security related activities in which the students participate. UWECyber demonstrated a new event this year using Lego Funfairs and Raspberry Pi’s to simulate attacks and mitigations against Cyber Physical Systems.

The Unlock Cyber taster day

The significance of cyber security outreach initiatives like the Unlock Cyber Taster Day is manifold:

  • Raising awareness of the risks and importance of cyber security: Students can gain knowledge regarding various cyber threats, online safety practices and the significance of protecting their digital lives.
  • Developing interest and curiosity: By engaging in hand-son activities, demonstrations and workshops, students can develop a genuine interest in the subject area, potentially inspiring them to pursue careers in cyber security or related fields.
  • Skills development: By providing interactive sessions where children can learn practical skills such as coding, ethical hacking, or data protection, they are introduced to fundamental concepts and tools used in the industry, thereby being better able to protect themselves and others from cyber threats.
  • Fostering critical thinking and problem-solving abilities: The events often require analytical thinking, problem-solving and creativity and participating in these activities can enhance these abilities, which can support students in a wide variety of aspects in life, not just cyber security.
  • Promoting diversity and inclusion: Like many STEM fields, cyber security has traditionally been male dominated. Inspiring children, especially females and underrepresented groups can help break down barriers and encourage diversity in the industry. By showcasing successful role models and providing for inclusive environments, these events can inspire children from all backgrounds to pursue a career in cyber security.

UWEcyber academics present at annual NCSC Education Ecosystem Conference

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Last week, a team from UWEcyber attended the annual NCSC Education Ecosystem conference hosted in Leeds. Ian Johnson (AHOD Cyber Security) and Phil Legg (Professor of Cyber Security) attended as Co-Directors of the UWEcyber Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education (ACE-CSE), along with Aida Abzhaparova (Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security and Global Politics) and Alan Mills (Lecturer in Cyber Security), who have both led outreach projects through the ACE-CSE this year. Phil Legg also presented an interactive session at the conference along with his external colleagues from Abertay University and the University of Roehampton as part of his ongoing leadership within the CISSEUK initiative to bring greater collaboration between academia, industry and government, and to improve the connectivity of the education pipeline into cyber security.

Alan Mills presented on the ACE-CSE project for upskilling school teachers across the region. This year, we expanded our teacher training initiative to cover six workshops across two locations (UWE Bristol and Gloucestershire College, Cheltenham), to reach a more varied and diverse mix of educators across the South West region. The workshops were specifically structured around three themes: cyber security for young people (for students years 7-9), cyber security basics (for students years 9-11), and cyber security careers and apprenticeships (for students years 11-13). The project has proved to be a success, with excellent feedback from the teachers who attended, and with a number of follow-up collaborations already underway. We continue to work closely with schools across the region, to help both students and teachers alike to upskill in their cyber security knowledge and expertise.

Phil Legg giving his presentaton

Aida Abzhaparova then presented on the ACE-CSE project for upskilling SMEs across the region. This wa a collaborative project between the cyber security team at UWE, and the DRAGoN team who focus on issues of data governance and privacy – bringing together these two core areas from within UWE to deliver combined workshops. Over two workshops we have helped over 17 SMEs to better understanding cyber security issues, and how they relate to their specific organisation, from construction, to accounting, and even circus skills – the diversity of organisations that chose to attend was fantastic to see! We have also helped to introduce SMEs to the “Five Safes” model developed by DRAGoN as a suitable means of thinking about the access and usage of sensitive data within their organisation.

The conference brings together academia, industry and government, including the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, the Department for Education, NCSC and GCHQ, as well as the UK Cyber Security Council and other major stakeholders across UK cyber security.

UWE Bristol researchers develop novel defence against adversarial machine learning attacks on Cyber Security Intrusion Detection Systems

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

As cyber attacks evolve in their sophistication, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have often been seen as a way to mitigate threats on computer networks.

Yet, attackers continue to evade detection and cause disruption through the spread of malicious software and other common attack processes. There is a growing trend of being able to evade machine learning systems to conduct attacks, by effectively compromising the intended functionality of the machine learning system.

Recent work by Andrew McCarthy, a PhD student at UWE Bristol studying cyber security analytics, has been able to demonstrate both the feasibility of conducting such attacks against Intrusion Detection Systems, as well as proposing a novel approach to combat against the vulnerabilities that machine learning classifiers may exhibit.

Whilst the domain of adversarial machine learning often addresses computer vision systems, this cutting-edge research applies these concepts in cyber security, to understand what future threats may look like, and how best to develop Intrusion Detection Systems to avoid such vulnerabilities.

The results of Andrew’s recent PhD work have just been published in the high-ranking Journal of Information Systems and Applications (Elsevier). Andrew is in the final stages of completing his PhD study, working with Professor Phil Legg (Director of Studies) and supported by industry partner Techmodal through the UWE Partnership PhD scheme.

The full paper is available online.

Research success working with the UK Defence Sector to defend our cyber space

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

For the UK Defence Sector, there is an ever-growing need to defend in our cyber space as well as the traditional domains of land, air, space and sea. Understanding the complexities of monitoring cyber space to ensure that an operational mission is a challenging task, that involves collating indicators of compromise and other related sources of information and applying data science skills to aggregate and reason about incoming observations. A team of UWE researchers, led by Professor Phil Legg, are working with Bristol-based TRIMETIS to develop innovation in this domain, and together the team have recently secured £200,000 funding from the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) to support two new research projects that address these problems.

The first project seeks to understand the human-machine teaming aspects of how analysts can interrogate and reason about data observations to inform cyber defence. Furthermore, by developing improved human-machine teaming efforts, underpinning by machine learning techniques, will enable improved decision-making in response to cyber threats, and an improved synergy between how machine learning can help to reason about data and improve a human analyst’s workflow, whilst also developing a model to understand how a human analyst will reason about data, such that this can improve the system interaction further. 

The second project seeks to understand how humans can better serve as sensors about the environment to protect and defend against threats. This involves improved reporting mechanisms of threats, both online and offline, and how this information can be integrated within larger data analytics and reasoning platforms about a given mission. The project will seek to understand the barriers of reporting, and how technology can enable better data collection from observers, such that this information can then be better utilised within human-machine based analysis.

The two projects will both launch in January 2023 and will run for 9 months. The resulting outputs will be shared with the defence communities and through wider academic dissemination. This recent set of projects complement the portfolio of work that UWEcyber has conducted with DSTL and the defence community over a number of years, with previous DSTL-funded UWE projects including ARCD (2022), HASTE (2018), and RicherPicture (2015, 2017).

Measuring the Suitability of Artificial Intelligence in Autonomous Resilience for Cyber Defence

Author Anna Jones | Posted on

Artificial Intelligence has attracted wide use in many aspects of society, from facial recognition and recommendation systems, through to predicting crime rates and autonomous vehicles. AI technologies are widely used in defence, including how agent-based systems can detect and respond to cyber threats when under attack from adversaries.

Whilst this continues to be a ripe area of research, there are important questions to be asked about the suitability of AI within autonomous resilience for cyber defence, relating to the usability of AI, specifically on how end users may utilise the decisions that are generated by an AI defence system, and how an end user can better understand and reason about how the decisions of the AI are formulated.

UWE researchers Professor Phil Legg and Andrew McCarthy are working with TRIMETIS and PA Consulting to address this important research question, supported by QinetiQ and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL). The project is part of the SERAPIS Framework that supports rapid research and innovation to supply into the UK Ministry of Defence.

This programme of research will impact on how the UK can better identify, investigate and respond to threats in the cyber domain, as well as the impact of cyber across traditional defence areas of land, sea, air and space, and understand the role that artificial intelligence and agent-based systems will have in maintaining the defence and security of the UK.

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