Cybersecurity researchers from our university have been awarded over £1.2M to help the tech infrastructure of UK organisations and digital devices to be more resilient to cyber attacks.
Led by Principal Investigator, Professor Michael Butler, the Holistic Design of Secure Systems on Capability Hardware (HD-Sec) project will receive funding as part of a £10M investment in nine projects by the UK government through its ‘Digital Security by Design’ programme announced by Digital Secretary, Oliver Dowden. The funding is managed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
Southampton’s HD-Sec solution aims to create formal methods to guide software design which will speed up the process and reduce errors and security vulnerabilities that could have been exploited by hackers. The University’s research will be guided and validated by a range of security-critical industrial case studies with support from industrial partners Airbus, Arm, Altran, AWE, Galois, L3Harris, Northrop Grumman and Thales.
“Our vision is the transformation of security system development from an error-prone, iterative build-test-fix approach to a correctness-by-construction approach whereby formal methods guide the design of software in such a way that it satisfies its specification by construction,” Professor Butler explains. “The impact of this will be to reduce overall development costs, while increasing trustworthiness, of security-critical systems.”
Prof Butler is joined on the HD-Sec project by Electronics and Computer Science colleagues Professor Vladimiro Sassone, Dr Thai Son Hoang, Dr Leonardo Aniello and Dr Dana Dghaym.
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