Professor Awais Rashid
BSc, MSc, PhD
Current positions
Professor of Cyber Security
School of Computer Science
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
Head, Bristol Cyber Security Group
Director, National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online (REPHRAIN))
Director, EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Cyber Security: Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security in Large-scale Infrastructures (TIPS-at-Scale)
Principle Investigator and Editor-in-Chief, Cyber Security Body of Knowledge (CyBOK)
My research spans cyber security and software engineering. I focus on novel software modularity techniques that underpin software that is adaptable, evolvable and resilient in the face of changes and the volatile nature of user requirements and behaviours in the modern digital world. This naturally ties in with my cyber security research which focuses on developing tools and techniques that are adaptable to the constantly changing threat patterns utilised by criminals online. I am particularly interested in security of cyber-physical systems, such as, industrial control systems and Internet of Things. I am also a keen researcher of adversarial and non-adversarial behaviours pertaining to cyber security. I lead projects as part of the UK Research Institute on Trustworthy Industrial Control Systems (RITICS) and UK Research Institute on Socio-technical Cyber Security (RISCS), the National Centre of Excellence on Cyber Security of Internet of Things (PETRAS) and am a member of the UK Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST). I also lead research on readiness of software engineers and developers to work with new secure hardware as part of the ESRC Hub on Digital Security by Design (Discribe). I am a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. Prior to joining the University of Bristol, I was co-founder and co-director of the Security Lancaster Institute at Lancaster University.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
CyBOK Phase VI
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Computer ScienceDates
01/08/2023 to 31/07/2026
Bristol Cyber Defence Exercise on Critical National Infrastructure
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Computer ScienceDates
01/05/2023 to 30/09/2023
SoBigData RI PPP
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Computer ScienceDates
01/10/2022 to 30/09/2025
Equitable Privacy
Principal Investigator
Description
Digital technologies are becoming pervasive in society, from online shopping and social interactions through to finance, banking, transportation. With a future vision of smart cities, driven by a real-time, data-driven,…Managing organisational unit
Department of Computer ScienceDates
01/09/2022 to 28/02/2026
Thesis supervisions
Human Detection of Attacks Against Cyber-Physical Systems
Supervisors
Deviant Security
Supervisors
Usable Abstractions for Secure Programming
Supervisors
Publications
Selected publications
01/05/2019The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Discovering "unknown known" security requirements
Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE 2016, Austin, TX, USA, May 14-22, 2016
It Bends But Would It Break? Topological Analysis of BGP Infrastructures in Europe
IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy, EuroSP 2016, Saarbrücken, Germany, March 21-24, 2016
Recent publications
15/03/2024Analysing the activities of far-right extremists on the Parler social network
Proceedings of the 2023 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM)
ExD
NSPW ’23
The Internet of Insecure Cows - A Security Analysis of Wireless Smart Devices Used for Dairy Farming
CPSIoTSec '23: Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on CPS&IoT Security and Privacy
Threat Models over Space and Time: A Case Study of E2EE Messaging Applications
International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (Co-located with Euro SnP)
Towards Human-Centric Endpoint Security
Proceedings of the International Security Protocols Workshop