This week we welcome four new members to the CDIT team.

Michelle McClintock joins CDIT to complete her PhD research on an organisational framework for enterprise security architecture.

While modern enterprise architecture frameworks have planned to capture a holistic picture of an organisation, security has been identified as a separate component which fails to have impact on the organisation. The effect of this placement is to reduce the impact of the organisation’s confidentiality, availability and integrity.  Michelle aims to rectify this by creating a holistic business framework for enterprise security architecture that business or government could use to ensure the required security properties throughout the organisation.

Matt Hart joins CDIT to complete his PhD research on secure implementations of software-defined-network controllers.

Software defined networks is a paradigm shift from a network design based on distributed, autonomous routers to a centrally controlled network where a single controller manages and controls the operations of the routers.  Software defined networks increase the flexibility of the networking infrastructure and reduce IT costs.  However the central controller is a lucrative target for hackers and requires special protection.  Matt’s work will improve the design of the network controller to ensure correct operation even when the controller is under attack.

Gefei Li joins CDIT to complete his masters research on evaluation of lightweight ciphers.

Lightweight ciphers aim to provide the same security guarantees as popular ciphers while minimising the implementation hardware costs.  Gefei’s work evaluates the security properties of proposed lightweight ciphers and their resilience to both standard and to new cryptanalysis techniques.

Tom Allan joins CDIT as an intern to work on micro-architectural side-channel attacks. In his work he will improve the existing attacks and will help identifying new attack vectors.  This work is part of our collaboration with NICTA.