Post-doctoral Research Position in Security of Cyber-Physical Systems
Senior Research Associate: Dynamic Policies for Cyber-Physical Infrastructures under Attack Security Lancaster Research Centre/School of Computing and Communications
- Salary: PS32,600 to PS37,768
- Closing Date: Sunday 31 January 2016
Details and application link: https://hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=A1371R
The world is experiencing a massive growth in cyber physical systems (CPS). Little is currently understood about the resilience of CPS in the face of unfolding attacks or when part of the CPS is compromised as a result of an attack. This position is funded by the EPSRC/CHIST-ERA project, DYPOSIT. The project tackles the particular challenge of dynamically formulating and adapting security policies, rapidly and on-demand, in the face of unfolding attacks on a shared CPS fabric integrating multiple applications run by a variety of stakeholders. The dynamic policies approach to be developed within DYPOSIT offers a new perspective on the role of policies in large-scale CPS settings. It aims to transform policies from simply a means to enforce pre-defined security properties to policies as living, evolving objects that play a central role in reasoning about the security state of such a CPS and responding to unfolding attacks. You will conduct in depth research into security policy models for CPS under attack. Working in collaboration with project partners (KU Leuven, Belgium and University College Cork, Ireland), you will develop a dynamic policies model and associated reasoning techniques and policy instantiation mechanisms. You will also develop a framework which enables collection of information to reason about the security state of a CPS and enforcement of dynamic policies. You will also take a leading role in the evaluation of the research outcomes. An extensive real-world testbed for security of industrial control systems (representing complex CPS in such settings) is already available within Security Lancaster. You will utilise and configure the testbed with suitable scenarios and configurations for use in experimental work within the project and will also take a leading role in the design and execution of experiments within the testbed. You will join a thriving multi-disciplinary community of 80 researchers within Security Lancaster, tackling current and future challenges to the security and resilience of individuals, organisations, infrastructures and society-at-large. The Centre and the School of Computing and Communications (where you will be based) both offer a highly inclusive and stimulating environment for research career development. There is a strong expectation that you will actively contribute to the strong profile of the Centre and its inter-disciplinary ethos through participation in the development and publication of research results.
The post is available from the 1st of March 2016 with an end date of 30 November 2018.
Informal enquiries should be addressed to Professor Awais Rashid, Director of Security Lancaster and Principal Investigator of the project, email: marash@comp.lancs.ac.uk or telephone +44 1524 510316. We welcome applications from people in all diversity groups.