School of Computing Science

Software Engineering and Information Security

The Software Engineering and Information Security group has a number of research themes including:

  • Usable Security: Research into making security products usable, helping people to protect themselves from computer crime, innovative alternative authentication mechanisms
  • Contingency planning for software security: this aims to increase the resilience of computational infrastructures to adverse events including cybersecurity threats, major bugs and blackouts.
  • Software engineering for space based systems: this work develops new architectures and design techniques for space related software including human space flight and satellite based location services.
  • Safety-critical software engineering: this work analyses the causes of failure in complex software systems ranging from aviation through to healthcare and alternative energy applications.
  • Computer Forensics: examines the recovery and analysis of any type of digital data from any type of digital media so that it will stand up in a court of law. This includes examining dependability of forensic software, the effectiveness of extraction techniques in both pervasive and traditional technologies.
  • Dependable social technical systems: Using modelling and simulation of socio-technical systems to improve dependability and predict potential failures

Academic Staff: Prof Chris Johnson, Dr Ronald R Poet, Dr Karen V Renaud, Dr Tim Storer, Prof David A Watt.

Research Assistants and Research Students: Mr Muhammad Imran Abbasi, Mr Hani Aljahdali, Mr Md Sadek Ferdous, Mrs Huda Al-Shuaily, Mrs Heather Crawford, Miss Rosanne English, Ms Wendy Goucher, Mr George Grispos, Mr Salem Jebriel, Mr Joe Maguire, Mr Jan Muhammad, Mr Stefan Raue, Mr Yulun Song.

Keywords: usable security, alternative authentication, information security management, cyber-security, digital forensics, dependable heterogeneous software infrastructures, dependable software based systems, biometrics, computational trust, software engineering for science, steganography, security of space based infrastructures, contingency planning for software security.