News Archive

In November 2011, Feng Hao was awarded an EPSRC grant for a project titled "Bridging Theory and Practice on Key Exchange Protocols" The grant is currently funding an RA in our school to work on key exchange protocols, which are a foundational technology for all secure communication systems. We will critically analyze existing schemes, and design new key exchange techniques that are more robust and efficient. The project will also include taking the J-PAKE protocol (a key exchange technique that was designed by me and Peter Ryan a few years ago, and that has been adopted by Mozilla Firefox, SeaMoneky, OpenSSL, OpenSSH etc) to international standards.

The User Managed Access draft standard has been submitted to IETF for consideration as a standard. Newcastle University's Maciej Machulak is vice-Chair of UMA, and leader of the SMART software project sponsored by JISC, which is mentioned in the UMA press announcement.

A SiDE Project case study of the project is now also available.

Sixty members of regional Independent Sexual/Domestic Violence Agencies (ISVA/IDVA) were back in the class room for one day on July 6, 2011. During a networking event, they received training in the use of a document sharing web site, in the School of Computer Science's computer lab 'The Mill'.

In collaboration with the Northumbria Local Criminal Justice Board, the School of Computing Science has developed a Google site that allows charities in the North-East to share information. Motivated by observed funding shortages, the LCJB came to the School of Computing Science to investigate if online methods could supplement face-to-face meeting. As a result, John Mace, PhD student in the Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security, created a Google site for the charities.

Sixty staff members from more than 30 regional charities were present at the event. In the morning they received training in the use of the web site. Under the watchful eye of volunteering students that were available to answer questions, they were guided through the basic steps necessary to make use of the site.

The Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security at Newcastle University have held two events, both of which attracted an audience of over 100 people.

The latest event - Threats and Trust in Cyberspace - took place at the Great North Museum: Hancock.

Social Networking technologies such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are a popular tool for communication in all walks of life. They can help to stay in touch with friends, improve career opportunities, improve the communication within your company, or are thought of as the backbone for future government.

But there are dangers and limitations in using these Social Networking technologies, as witnessed by various news stories in the past years. In this one-day event we discussed these issues from various perspectives, asking the question: can businesses, government and individuals trust these technologies?

The day's discussions were not limited to traditional social networking technologies such as Facebook, but looked more generally at basing social structures and interactions on technology, for instance in future government. What are the main threats for individuals and society in using Internet-based networking services, and what are researchers doing to alleviate the potential problems?

The cybercrime event targeted industry and government professionals and researchers from many disciplines, including computing, social science, law, and psychology.

At this event demonstrations ran in parallel with our invited speakers, further details are available by clicking the link below.

The Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security welcomes SMART (Student-Managed Access to Online Resources) as its new research project. SMART is being developed by Prof. Aad van Moorsel, Maciej Machulak, Lukasz Moren and Chris Franks and is funded by the JISC organisation. The SMART project will develop an online data access management system based on the User-Managed Access (UMA) Web protocol, a newly proposed technology that is being standardised by the User-Managed Access Work Group (charter of the Kantara Initiative). The developed UMA-based system will be deployed and evaluated at Newcastle University.

The team has recently presented its ongoing research and prototype software at various venues, including presentations at the UMA Workshop collocated with European Identity Conference 2010 (Munich), Internet Identity Workshops Xa (Mountain View, CA) and during invited talk at HP Labs (Palo Alto, CA).

Checkout the SMART website or the SMART blog for more information.

The PowerPoint slides from the Newcastle University presentations at last month's launch event.

Two of the centre's posters are also available below.

Researchers Paul Dunphy, David Kim, Jon Hook and Prof. Patrick Olivier in the School of Computing Science have developed an alternative to numeric PIN codes for improved security when using a mobile phone (New Scientist, 14 January 2010, pp16&17).
http://tinyurl.com/yb9zh3r

Project website: http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/david.kim/multi-touch_authentication/

Ahmad El Ahmad was shortlisted by local newspaper Evening Chronicle for a Young Achiever Award in the category of Technology Achievement for his work on CAPTCHAs. Last month at the Hilton hotel Ahmad took home a runner-up certificate and a cash cheque.
Story at the Evening Chronicle website

Ahmad was the only finalist for this award one year before, but due to the economical downturn, the organisers decided to carry forward all the shortlisted to year 2009.

Jeff Yan's research team working on CAPTCHAs has been shortlisted for the prestigious Times Higher Education Awards 2009, in the Outstanding Engineering Research Team of the Year category. Winners will be announced at a ceremony on 15 October, in London. Update: the award was won by University of Greenwich.

The HEIF funded SAFER Internet training, developed by the Centre for Cybercrime and Computer Security will be launched on 19th October 2009.