Pierre Ciholas – Systems & Security Group (SSG)

I am a PhD student supervised by Dr. Daniel Prince and Dr. Angelos Marnerides, who was awarded a studentship by Lancaster University following my Cyber Security MSc.

I began my research work during my MSc thesis in which I attempted to create a framework to link vulnerabilities and weaknesses in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) incidents, evaluating the possibility of detecting these “composite vulnerabilities” before incidents happen. I then began my PhD by studying in more details the various characteristics of the different types of CPS, before narrowing down my research to Building Management Systems and Industrial Control Systems. After a thorough investigation of both the state of the art and state of practice of the security of these systems, I am now writing my PhD thesis along with its core contribution: A framework to assess the security of devices.

Research interests:

Cyber-Physical Systems security, with special focus on Building Management Systems and Industrial Control Systems.
Malware, reverse engineering, and vulnerability research, mainly on operating systems.
Network communications and systems security

Publications:

The security of smart buildings: a systematic literature review Ciholas, Pierre, Aidan Lennie, Parvin Sadigova, and Jose M. Such. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.05837 (2019)
Basic Cyber Hygiene: Does It Work? Such, Jose M., Pierre Ciholas, Awais Rashid, John Vidler, and Timothy Seabrook. Computer 52, no. 4 (2019): 21-31.
Fast and Furious: Outrunning Windows Kernel Notification Routines from User-Mode Ciholas, Pierre, Jose Miguel Such, Angelos K. Marnerides, Benjamin Green, Jiajie Zhang, and Utz Roedig. In International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment, pp. 67-88. Springer, Cham, 2020.
{ICS} Testbed Tetris: Practical Building Blocks Towards a Cyber Security Resource Green, Benjamin, Richard Derbyshire, William Knowles, James Boorman, Pierre Ciholas, Daniel Prince, and David Hutchison. In 13th {USENIX} Workshop on Cyber Security Experimentation and Test ({CSET} 20). 2020.
Composite vulnerabilities in Cyber Physical Systems Ciholas, Pierre, and Jose M. Such. Security and Resilience of Cyber-‐Physical Infrastructures (2016): 4.

News & Events
IEEE TFS’24 Y. Li et al, Adversarial Attack Detection via Fuzzy Predictions. pdf
ECCV’24 Y. Li et al, Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Adversarial Attack Detection. pdf
ANRW '24 S. Kastanakis et al, Investigating Location-Aware Advertisements in Anycast IP Networks. pdf
IJCNN '24 Y. Li et al, Rethinking Self-Supervised Learning for Cross-Domain Adversarial Sample Recovery. pdf
ICANN '24 Y. Li et al, Federated Adversarial Learning for Robust Autonomous Landing Runway Detection. pdf
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