I am Associate Professor at University College Dublin at the School of Computer Science. I am also a funded investigator at Lero - the Irish Software Research Centre. I am also the Director of the UCD MSc in Cybersecurity.
My research interests include requirements engineering and adaptive systems. My work has focused on using runtime models to engineer complex systems, including cyber-physical systems, in order to satisfy their security requirements, and ensure that they are forensic-ready and comply with data protection regulations.
If you are interested in doing research about secure software engineering and have a passion for making things concrete and not just on paper, drop me a line. Several thesis topics, as well as smaller projects are available around these themes!
News
13/04/2023 CSCML paper accepted: The paper titled "Enhancing Ransomware Classification with Multi-Stage Feature Selection and Data Imbalance Correction" co-authored with Faithful Chiagoziem Onwuegbuche, and Anca Jurcut was accepted at the 7th International Symposium on Cybersecurity, Cryptography and Machine Learning (CSCML 2023).
27/02/2023 Future Internet paper accepted: The paper titled "A Vulnerability Assessment Approach for Transportation Networks Subjected to Cyber-Physical Attacks" co-authored with Konstantinos Ntafloukas, Beatriz Martinez-Pastor and Daniel McCrum was accepted at the Future Internet MDPI journal.
31/11/2022 Computers & Security paper accepted: The paper titled "Forensic Readiness of Industrial Control Systems Under Stealthy Attacks" was accepted at the Computers & Security Elsevier journal.
Service
Scientific events I am currently involved in:
ICSE 2023 (PC Member): 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023).
REFSQ 2023 (PC member): 29th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2023).
SEAMS 2023 (PC member): 18th Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2023).
PhD Students
I am lucky to supervise the following PhD students:
Fanny Rivera-Ortiz, Engineering Forensic-Ready Systems using Automated Logging.
Konstantinos Ntafloukas, Cyber Risk Assessment in Critical Transportation Infrastructures, co-supervised with Dr. Daniel McCrum.
Faithful Chiagoziem Onweugbuche, Adaptive Ransomware Detection, co-supervised with Dr. Anca Jurcut.
Kushal Ramkumar, Sustainable Adaptive Security, co-supervised with Prof. Bashar Nuseibeh.
Ruth Buckley, Cyber Information Sharing in ISACs, co-supervised with Profs. Markus Helfert and Bashar Nuseibeh.
Past PhD Students
Mazen Azzam, "Physics-based Early Warnings for Forensic Readiness in Industrial Control Systems". Mazen is now Optical Sensing Engineer at ASML, The Netherlands
Faeq Alrimawi, "Software Engineering for Forensic-Ready Cyber-Physical Systems".
Faeq is now PostDoctoral researcher at Lero and the University of Limerick.