TFInstitute Autumn Conference on 'Security & Trust'

Security and Trust

How to empower and protect all users?

The Tommy Flowers Autumn Conference took place 26–27 September 2017 - our third conference in the Institute’s first year. 

Over 130 people attended across the two days, with students and academics from across more than a dozen universities and with senior representatives from some of the world’s biggest ICT companies and Innovation Martlesham members - with ADVA, Sandvine, Vodafone, Huawei, Cisco; Intel and the National Crime Agency all presenting.

The event went exceptionally well with excellent feedback from both students and industry.

The conference focussed on Security and Trust, addressing how the ICT industry must protect customers and themselves from deliberate external and internal attacks. How technology can empower users and how new capabilities can, in turn, enable new kinds of attack or have unintended consequences - resulting in a constant evolution across technology, user behaviour and the perception of human rights.

 

 
Professor Ben Azvine – BT Research & Innovation’s Global head of security research and innovation hosted the event.

 

"Cyber security is, in my opinion, one of the greatest man-made challenges of our time", explained Ben. "The frequency and impact of breaches is increasing and we need to continuously adapt and innovate to stay ahead of the threat environment."

 

Over the course of the conference, a number of panel sessions were held addressing:

• The wider society viewpoint
• The industrial view point
• Industry’s perspectives on Security

Addressing the societal viewpoint, the audience were treated to an interactive panel session with Prof Howard Shrobe (Director of Cyber Security @ CSAIL, MIT); Ian Daft (National Crime Agency) and Prof Lorna McGregor (Director of University of Essex Human Rights Centre).

 

Howard discussed case studies looking at pitfalls in the current security design architectures and discussed new architectures that could lead to 3 classes of benefits - Prevention; Resilience and Regeneration – allowing systems to recover more quickly from attacks to fully functional states.

 

Ian Daft explained the workings of the NCA, discussing the fight to cut serious and organised crime; how innovating with industry is so important and gaining confidence and trust from the public.

 

Prof Lorna McGregor provided a fascinating insight into "algorithmic accountability" – in other words, when so much of our lives are now controlled by algorithms (Artificial Intelligence software applying statistical techniques to huge data-sets), how do we know who is ultimately responsible for the decisions that are being made, and how can we challenge them?

 

The industrial panel session was chaired by Alex Healing, BT Research & Innovation’s Chief Researcher Visual Analytics. He was joined by Kevin Smith (Senior Technology Strategist, Vodafone); Igor Shaula (Solutions Architect, Intel) and Chris Roberts (Security Service Creation, Cisco). Each provided an interesting perspective, discussing:

• The future of security
• How it is important to include the security aspects into new technology designs
• Increased expectations from technology by the customer
• 5G network demands including fast, resilient, adaptable and secure
• Improving customer experience without breaching customer privacy
• Virtual Reality services
• Industry being responsible for Big Data

The BT Research and Innovation’s Security practice provided an in-depth Industrial case study, describing the challenges and changing threats of the landscape and by collaborating with industry and Universities, a whole host of hot topics can be addressed including: CLOUD environments; IoT Security; machine assisted cyber threat hunting; authentications; pattern based anomaly detection; Blockchain architecture; cryptography; flexible interactive visualisation; Intelligence Augmentation and Bitcoin.

 

An industrial panel, consisting of Huawei (Jerry Thompson and Michael Hill- King); ADVA Optical Networking (Uli Schlegel) and Sandvine (Matt Farmer) provided an insight into their perspectives on security, discussing embedded security in devices; CLOUD architectures; post quantum and terabit encryption; problems with IoT devices and how to learn from their behaviour and how they pull innovation from universities.

 

Throughout the conference and using the lessons learned from each of the panel sessions, breakout sessions were held discussing the most important scientific research challenges (to protect from attacks; to defend human rights and to enable society to prosper) and how the research of the post graduate researchers could contribute.

 

Key points captured:

• We must secure systems to help society prosper
• We need to understand how national crime agencies come into play
• We should approach security from a holistic point of view – developing technology to improve our lifestyle, thereby improving the world to become a better place
• The importance to educate and empower the user in responsible ways
• Making people more aware of their personal data and how it is used

Students identified ways in which their own research can contribute:

• Smart home environments and privacy – understanding what it means to individuals and groups of people e.g. families. Different components and cultural aspects need to be taken into consideration.
• Internet of Things (IoT) – develop algorithms which are fast and smart
• Looking at risk management and methods to make IoT more secure – making the most of the data and analytics currently collected

A tour around the "Network Operations Centre" provided Tommy Flowers Institute members the amazing opportunity to view the heart of BT’s operations and discussing the security of the centre.

 

BT Research & Innovation’s Head of University Research, Fraser Burton said, "Over the first year, the Institute has gone from strength to strength, with growing involvement across academia, industry and government. As the pace of change in the digital economy increases, we are increasingly using autonomic systems to support our decision-making and we need to ensure our future research leaders create and understand the powerful new tools that are now possible.

We look forward to an even more exciting second year, growing the capability of the ICT industry for the benefit of the whole of the UK".

 

Lorna McGregor is back and speaking at the 'Data Science & AI' forum of our Autumn 2020 virtual conference

Let's Get Physical - Autumn 2020 Conference

Date: 12th - 16th October 2020
Location: Virtual 

Fees: none, you can register for as many days as you like

Register: here! 

Find out more.

We are absolutely delighted to have Lorna McGregor back, attending the forum discussion on 'How do we know that AI is doing the right thing?' Please tune it on Friday 16th October at 2PM.

Lorna was as well a Keynote speaker at our conference on 'Security & Trust - How to empower and protect all users'.

 

Lorna McGregor is a Professor in the Law School and Director of the Human Rights Centre (on study leave 2017) at the University of Essex. She is the Principal Investigator and Co-Director of an ESRC Large Grant (£5 million) on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology. Lorna is also a Co-Chair of the European Society of International Law's Interest Group on Human Rights, a Co-Chair of the International Law Association's Study Group on Individual Responsibility in International Law, a Contributing Editor of EJIL Talk! and a Commissioner of the British Equality and Human Rights Commission. 

 

Prior to joining the Law School, Lorna worked for REDRESS and the International Bar Association. Lorna holds an LL.B (First Class Honours) from Edinburgh Law School and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, where she was a Kennedy Memorial Trust Scholar and Henigson Fellow. 

Prof Howard Shrobe to talk at our conference on 'Security & Trust'

Howard Shrobe is Director of CyberSecurity@CSAIL.  His research interests include software and hardware architectures for computer security and the use of AI techniques in software development and other engineering disciplines. At the present time his main interests are in new (hardware and software) architectures for secure computing, the security of industrial control systems, intelligent  assistants for programmers, and policy issues related to cyber security.

·         From 1997 - 2000, he served as associate director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

·         From 1994 - 1997, he served at  DARPA  as Assistant Director and Chief Scientist of the Information Technology Office. He was responsible for the Intelligent Systems and Software Technology group in the office with direct involvement in the Evolutionary Design of Complex Software and the original suite of Information Survivability programs.

·        From Feb 2010 - Oct 2013, he served at  DARPA as a Program Manager Information Innovation Office where he sponsored two programs on cyber security: CRASH (Clean-slate design of Resilient Adaptive Secure Hosts) and MRC (Mission-oriented Resilient Clouds).

·         From Oct 2013 - November 2014 I served as Associate Director of CSAIL

Uli Schlegel of ADVA to speak at our conference on Security & Trust

'ADVA Optical Networking SE' is one of our strongest supporters since the beginnings of Tommy Flowers Institute and we are delighted to have Uli Schlegel as speaker at our conference on 'Security & Trust - How to empower and protect all users'.

Uli Schlegel is ADVA Optical Networking’s technical expert for enterprise networks. He has over 17 years of experience in WDM technology and optical networking systems.

 

He holds an engineering degree (Dipl.-Ing. Physikalische Technik) from the University of Applied Sciences (TFH) in Berlin, Germany.

Uli currently drives product development in the data center interconnect space. He mainly focuses on solutions for storage and server connectivity as well as encryption and security relevant topics.

Ian Daft, NCA, to speak at our conference on 'Security & Trust'

We are proud to have Ian Daft from the National Crime Agency as a speaker at our conference.

 

Ian is a Manager within the Intelligence Collection Department of the NCA leading on the development of new capabilities to ensure the NCA is able to counter organised crime with public confidence and security.

 

At the moment he is giving specific attention to the application of Voice Biometrics and Analytics. A specific interest in the scope for appropriate co-operation between strategic partners.

 

His previous positions in the Agency have included in Financial Crime and as a Staff Officer within the Command Team. Prior to joining the NCA, Ian worked in Europol, Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office with his last posting being as 1st Secretary at the British Embassy in Athens. He holds a MA in History as well as degree level qualifications in Financial Crime, Personnel & Development and Project Management.

 

We are looking forward to interesting insights and discussions during our Tommy Flowers Institute Autumn Conference on 'Security & Trust - How to empower and protect all users?'

Prof Ben Azvine BT Head of Security Research

Prof Ben Azvine PhD, MBA
Global head of security research and innovation, BT

Conference TFNetworkSpring22

Digital Transformation
➣ Conference overview and registration 
➣ YouTube TFNetworkSummer21 Conference Playlist 

Date: 5th May 2022
Time: 

11:15 - 11:30 Presentation

11:30 - 12:15 Panel discussion "How to create impact in Digital Transformation

Ben Azvine is responsible for setting direction and strategy for Security research, identify innovation opportunities and lead a strong international team of researcher to develop new capabilities in collaboration with industrial and academic partners.

Ben has 30 years’ experience in both academia and industry. His previous roles included leading the IT research centre and head of business intelligence & customer analytics research at BT Group Chief Technology Office. He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, an MSc in Control Engineering, a PhD in Intelligent Control Systems from Manchester University, and an MBA from Imperial College, London. Having held research fellowship and lectureship posts in several universities, he joined BT in 1995 to lead a research programme to develop and exploit novel Artificial Intelligence technology to support next generation IT systems. Since then he has held senior, principal, chief research scientist posts at BT’s global R&D headquarters in Adastral Park, Ipswich where he is currently based.

He has edited two books and published more than 100 scientific articles on novel application of intelligent systems. He is an inventor of 50 patent applications, has won 4 BCS and an IET gold medals for IT innovation, and holds visiting professorship positions at the Universities of Bristol, Cranfield, Suffolk and Bournemouth. Ben is a current fellow of Institute of Telecom Engineers (FIET) and has acted as the chairman of the European network of excellence for Uncertainty management techniques from 1998 to 2001. His current research interests include the application Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Cyber security, protection of critical national infrastructure, data analysis and information & knowledge management. His current projects include Visual Analytics for Cyber defence, cloud & Internet security, machine learning and anomaly detection in network data and future identity and access management.

LinkedIn

Ben was the sponsor of the TFNetworkAutumn17 "Security & Trust" conference

Synopsis

In 2017 already, Matthew Hancock, The UK Minister of State for Digital at the time, stated at the Singapore International Cyber Week:

“The UK categorises cyber-crime as a tier one threat to our national security. Since 2011 we have had in place a National Cyber Security Strategy. … Our full spectrum approach ranges from developing the new skills and expertise we need, supporting the cyber ecosystem, collaboration with critical infrastructure, the established cyber industry, start ups, and academia to protect our national security and protect the public’s way of life, while contributing to our prosperity and building a more trusted and resilient digital environment. …

Our growing expertise was perhaps best showcased during the 2012 Olympics. The London games were the first ever “digital games” - the first to provide public Wi-Fi access in all Olympic venues, with more content broadcast online than ever before, and much of it accessed via mobile devices - and yet, despite a peak of over 11,000 attacks per second, the network was never once compromised”

In 2017 as well, during our TFNetwork conference on “Security &Trust”, we explored how technology can empower users so that they can protect themselves and their data. And this means that we need that credible track-record of secure operation to create the user’s trust in those constantly evolving technologies, which have capabilities that potentially can turn the table, enabling new kinds of attacks. So there is constant evolution across technology, user behaviour, and the perception of human rights.

Half a decade later the digital landscape is evolving at an even increasing speed, and more than ever it is my opinion that Cyber Security is one of the greatest man-made challenges of our time. The frequency and impact of breaches is increasing at the same mindboggling trajectory as the digital transformation of our world, and the need to continuously adapt and innovate to stay ahead of the threat environment, is raising the bar for researchers.

 

Post Graduate Researcher Details - Reginald Ankrah

My name is Reginald Ankrah. I am a doctoral researcher at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. My research area concerns the use of computational techniques to optimise and solve real world problems in industries.

 

Telecommunications networks are vast and complex structures that need to undergo continual evolution to adapt to change. Telecoms technologies continually undergo rapid change. In parallel, user demand on networks is subject to ongoing growth periodically punctuated by the emergence of disruptive new products and services.

 

The market is highly competitive and so providers need to adapt promptly to demand. However, changes to the network involve considerable capital investment. This leads to complex investment decisions bearing significant financial, technical and reputational risk. In particular, to maximize return, new telecommunications networks must be designed to be robust enough to meet expected demands over their lifetime.

 

Computational intelligence offers a range of algorithms and techniques that are applicable to complex, multifactorial decision making. Probabilistic models derived from analysis of datasets can confer predictive insight into how decision outcomes are affected by interactions between various input factors.  They can also support Monte Carlo simulation of future decisions allowing what-if analysis, optimized decision-making and statistical confidence intervals for complex decision scenarios. Clustering approaches are used to identify similarities in datasets, for example, customer profiling. Optimisation algorithms like genetic algorithms, particle swarm optimisation and ant colonies optimisation can be used to optimize use and placement of resources when there are complex and conflicting decision factors involved. For example, such approaches would be useful in determining the placement of equipment and network structure.

 

My research aims at investigating the application of novel and advanced computational techniques to create specialised planning and risk-modelling algorithms focused on key aspects of network design.