Cohort 2025 Projects

Dr Sana Belguith (Bristol)

From Recovery to Recoverability: Continual Assurance of Backup and Recovery Systems

Organisations increasingly require controls that are verified, tested, and designed to ensure resilience in the face of rising real-world compromise. Resilience matters because prevention alone no longer suffices; the question for many organisations is not if they will face an attack, but when, and how effectively they can recover. Among the mechanisms that contribute to resilience, backups are pivotal: the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) identifies them as an essential component of response and recovery.

My current research interests centre on the cyber resilience of digital infrastructures, and my PhD focuses on the continual assurance of backup and recovery systems. I take a full-system approach (beyond data) and an end-to-end approach to assuring these systems. Through this research, I aim to assess the recoverability of these systems. I hope to see a shift from uncertain recovery attempts during a cyberattack to confident, resilient strategies through recoverability indicators.

Professor Awais Rashid (Bristol)

Professor Adam Joinson (Bath)

Dr Joanna Syrda (Bath)

Epistemic trust in OSINT: Provenance and the challenge of AI-generated content

Under what conditions can epistemic trust in OSINT be maintained when AI-generated content disrupts existing methods of provenance
verification?

This project reframes the post-trust problem in epistemic terms by looking at the conditions necessary under which any source can warrant belief, regardless of how it was produced (AI-generated or otherwise). The goal is to produce a guidance through Delphi validation with high-stakes OSINT actors, providing a decision-process practitioners can apply under real time and resource constraints.

Professor Adam Joinson (Bath)

Dr Tim Hill (Bath)

Dr Alma Oracevic (Bristol)

Dr Partha Das Chowdhury (Bristol)

Examining the Degradation of Secure Decision Making in Actor-Driven Insider Threats

Actor-driven insider threats are those who are the subject of social engineering and/or recruitment efforts from a malicious outside party, an aspect of the insider threat problem which is under-researched despite its atypical nature. Current research posits that actor-driven behaviour differs from expected threat activity, but the latent factors and theories at play have yet to be explored in depth. To address this problem, this project aims to examine the development of risk-taking behaviour and perception over the lifetime of an attack - how it may vary and the factors which could contribute to this change.

Dr Lukasz Piwek (Bath)

Dr Emma Walker (Bath)

Dr Matthew Edwards (Bristol)

Dr Phillip Newall (Bristol)

Dr Daniel Page (Bristol)

Dr Gretchen Hallett (Bristol)

Dr Joe Gardiner (Bristol)