Systems & Security Group (SSG) – Part of Security Institute, Lancaster University

Our growing reliance on computing technologies arises, in part, from our trust in the delivery of expected levels of sustained and correct services despite these computing systems encountering design, operational or deliberate perturbations.

The Systems & Security Group (SSG) undertakes fundamental and applied research, addressing the susceptibility of systems to compromises across the entire systems stack of hardware, software, middleware, and users. The group advocates a data-centric view, to comprehensively explore system-level challenges, spanning data at rest, transit, and over its usage. We research the interplay across vulnerabilities, threats, and impacts in order to provide quantifiably trustworthy (dependable, resilient, and secure) functionality in computing systems.

Our interests broadly cover the design, analysis, verification and validation of systems. Our current focus is on testing, formal verification, security risk assessment, privacy, and the provisioning of trustworthy ML/AI. Our application domains include distributed and virtualized environments, IoT and cyber-physical systems focusing on autonomous systems.

Where to Find Us

We are located in the B floor

Infolab21, South Drive

Lancaster University

Bailrigg, LA1 4WA

News & Events
IJCNN '24 A. Pellcier et al, UNICAD: A Unified Approach for Attack Detection, Noise Reduction and Novel Class Identification. pdf
NFM '24 O. Gunasekera et al, Real Arithmetic in TLAPM. pdf
IEEE TCC S. Manzoor et al, Enabling Multi-Layer Threat Analysis in Dynamic Cloud Environments. pdf
arXiv S. Winter et al, Error Propagation Analysis for Multithreaded Programs: An Empirical Approach. pdf
Springer Open’24 E. Chuah et al, An Empirical Study of Reflection Attacks Using NetFlow Data. pdf
Space Policy’23 V. Varadharajan et al, Security Challenges When Space Merges With Cyberspace. pdf
LANMAN’23 S. Rene et al, Scalable Content-centric Routing for Hybrid ICN. pdf
DAPPS’23 N. Keizer et al, Ditto: Towards Decentralised Similarity Search for Web3 Services. pdf
IMC’23 L. Balduf et al, The Cloud Strikes Back: Investigating the Decentralization of IPFS. pdf
CAMLIS’23 S. Trawicki et al, Compilation as a Defense: Enhancing DL Model Attack Robustness via Tensor Optimization. pdf
CAMLIS’23 L. Birch et al, Model Leeching: An Extraction Attack Targeting LLMs. pdf
SSCI’23 Y. Li et al, Fuzzy Detectors Against Adversarial Attacks. pdf
IMC’23 S. Kastanakis et al, 20 Years of Inferring Inter-domain Routing Policies. pdf
DASC’23 B. Yuksek et al, Federated Meta Learning for Visual Navigation in GPS-denied Urban Airspace. pdf
NDSS’24 S. Sridhar et al, Content Censorship in the InterPlanetary File System. pdf
MASS’23 Z. Yu et al, RAFL: A Robust and Adaptive Federated Meta-Learning Framework Against Adversaries. pdf
TOPS’23 Y. Lu et al, Privacy-preserving Decentralized Federated Learning over Time-varying Communication Graph. pdf
T-ASE’23 Y. Lu et al, Transactive Energy System Deployment over Insecure Communication Links. pdf
IJCNN’23 Y. Li et al, Domain Generalization and Feature Fusion for Cross-domain Imperceptible Adversarial Attack Detection. pdf
CyBok: SSG Prof. Suri defines NCSC’s CyBOK knowledge area on Distributed Systems Security
Prof. Suri to lead LU's ACE-CSE
Security Institute to lead £3M UKRI-TAS research node to examine cybersecurity in autonomous systems.^New
MSN'22 Best Paper Award for Z. Yu et al, PPFM: An Adaptive and Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer Federated Meta-Learning Framework
ICNC '23: A. Taha et al, Cloud Security Requirement Based Threat Analysis, to appear.
MSN'22: Z. Yu et al, PPFM: An Adaptive and Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer Federated Meta-Learning Framework. pdf
CIDUE/SSCI'22: E. Soares et al, Similarity-based Deep Neural Network to Detect Imperceptible Adversarial Attacks. pdf
ISSRE'22: Y. Chen et al, SlowCoach: Mutating Code to Simulate Performance Bugs. pdf
FGCS'22: M. Bradbury et al, Information Management for Trust Computation on Resource-constrained IoT Devices. pdf
ToSN'22: M. Bradbury et al, Threat Modelling Guided Trust-based Task Offloading for Resource-constrained Internet of Things. pdf
NCA'21: E. Chuah et al, Challenges in Identifying Network Attacks Using Netflow Data. pdf
COSE'21: B. Green et al, PCaaD: Towards automated determination and exploitation of industrial systems. pdf