Cybersecurity and privacy

Our Centre for Cyber Security Research (CCSR) offers a holistic, integrated and theoretically informed approach to human and technical cyber security.

Our leading academic team carries out research and innovation in cyber security analytics and artificial intelligence, i.e. the interpretation and effective communication of applied data science and AI methods through interdisciplinary insights into cyber risk, threat intelligence, attack detection and situational awareness drawn from computer science, data science, psychology, criminology and international relations.

We regularly publish work in world leading publications and have a strong PhD track record, and our grant income is approximately £20 million, with over £4.5 million secured to sustain research within our centre between 2023 and 2028.

We are proud to work with local and international collaborators across all sectors to carry out research that tackles real challenges and excites and inspires our next generation of cybersecurity professionals.

We have a strategic partnership with global manufacturing firm Airbus, including the launch of two Airbus Centres of Excellence at Cardiff University – Cyber Security Analytics in 2017, and Human Centric Cybersecurity in 2022.

Through academic secondments, student internships, funded PhDs, and post-doctoral researchers, our university-developed technology has been incorporated into commercial products and services (e.g. cyber risk consultancy and Security Operations Centre [SOC]), leading to transformation of cyber security methodologies and new revenue streams within the business.

We have a world-class testbed in our state-of-the-art Abacws building, consisting of a scalable cyber range and various cyber-physical systems that are representative of real-world IT and operational technology systems, on which we train our students and validate our research outcomes.

The new Cyber Attack and Defence Lab in Abacws brings cyber to life, with a £2 million investment in various realistic testbeds, including a mini-manufacturing production line, smart city, connected vehicle and rail link (which we think of as 'connected digital twins'). These enable virtualised networks where a ransomware attack can happen in real-time, and students and researchers learn how to deal with it.

Within this scope we have a number of core research themes including:

Artificial Intelligence-driven Security Operations & Incident Management: Focusing on early detection and automated responses to cyber attacks
Risk Management & Governance: Investigating goal-oriented risk, process and impact modelling, linked to data-driven intelligence
Human Factors: Focusing on individuals’ susceptibility to attack, cognitive aspects, and organised cybercrime
Cyber Physical Systems Security and Resilience: Detecting digital and physical indicators of compromise and mitigating attacks
Privacy and Distributed Systems Security: Ensuring privacy by design, whether in machine learning-based systems, or by improving transparency and trust in distributed (e.g. Cloud) and autonomous (e.g. vehicular) systems

Explore our research groups

Cyber security

We focus on the fusion of data science and artificial intelligence methods with interdisciplinary insights into cyber risk, threat intelligence, cyber threat modelling, predictive analytics, attack detection and situational awareness

Privacy

We look to detect, measure, and mitigate sensitive information leakage in various scenarios including data publishing, internet of things, mobile and cloud applications, and training machine learning algorithms.