Research Associate on Securing Convergent Ultra-large Scale Infrastructures

The Department of Computer Science is looking to employ a Postdoctoral Researcher to work within an interdisciplinary team on securing convergent ultra-large scale infrastructures (SCULI). The SCULI project is a research collaboration between University of Oxford, University of Bristol and the University of Lancaster that will be working closely with stakeholders and organisations from industry and the critical national infrastructure sectors. The project is investigating how to secure emerging ultra-large scale digital infrastructures which are seeing convergence and connectivity at unprecedented scale. This is true for both current critical national infrastructures and emerging future systems, e.g., smart cities, intelligent transportation, high-value manufacturing and Industry 4.0. Cybersecurity of such ultra-large scale infrastructures faces unprecedented complexity. Diverse legacy and non-legacy software and hardware compose on-the-fly to deliver services to millions of users with varying requirements and unpredictable actions. This complexity is compounded by intricate supply-chains and the need to deliver resilient operations in the presence of untrusted, partially trusted or compromised elements. Project web site: https://sculi.ac.uk/ The successful candidate will be required to work primarily under the direction of Professor Sadie Creese, with guidance from other senior academics and will be based in the Oxford team focused on the following research objectives:

• Continual assurance at ultra-large scale: How to reason, to requisite levels of accuracy and at an appropriate pace, about the security state at runtime to provide continuity of oversight and trust, when several elements may be partially trusted, under attack, vulnerable or compromised?
• Incident response at ultra-large scale: How to orchestrate incident response in a manner that accounts for heterogeneous incident response practices in constituent systems and provides situational awareness at the necessary pace and resolution for human-machine decision-making?
It is essential that successful candidate would hold a relevant PhD/DPhil or being close to completion in computer science or information systems. In addition, the successful candidate will be expected to collaborate with researchers working across the SCULI project, and cybersecurity professionals from business and industry. You will be required to upload a supporting statement, CV and the details of two referees as part of your online application.