Year 2 Student - 2025 Cohort - Cohort 7

I have a Master’s degree in Cybersecurity from the Université Libre de Bruxelles and a background in Telecommunications Engineering. My master’s thesis focused on synthetic attack data generation for automotive Ethernet, with an emphasis on the DoIP protocol, which helped shape my current research interests. My research interests lie broadly in edge computing security. I am curious about how to secure systems that are distributed, resource-constrained, and still expected to perform in real time.

Beyond End-of-Life: Security Assurance for Legacy Vehicles in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Modern vehicles are being designed to have longer lifetimes, embedded with connectivity and autonomous capabilities that enable them to interact with digital infrastructure. As these vehicles age, they will eventually outlive manufacturer support, while the infrastructure and security requirements around them continue to evolve.

This project investigates how legacy connected vehicles can remain trustworthy participants in evolving smart infrastructure when security updates are no longer available and isolating or replacing these vehicles is impractical. The focus is on investigating the factors that lead to security assurance degradation, developing methods to track and quantify this degradation over time, and exploring mechanisms that enable legacy vehicles to continue participating in intelligent transportation systems (ITS) without compromising the security of the wider system. The broader aim of this project is to contribute to sustainable security engineering by moving towards continuous security assurance throughout a vehicle's operational lifetime, even beyond manufacturer support.

Industry Placement - NCC Group
Through the placement, I engaged with domain experts to explore the safety and security assurance challenges associated with legacy infrastructure co-existing within Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS).

Academic Placement - Dr Sana Belguith
The placement involved conducting a literature review on assurance degradation in legacy safety critical systems.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborah-amanor/