Current CDT researchers

Briana Bowen

Prior to joining the CDT, Briana cofounded and served as Associate Director of the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence at Utah State University, codesigning and teaching in the US’s first academic curriculum in the field of anticipatory intelligence. She has served as co-PI of a Minerva Research Initiative grant focused on human governance implications of emerging AI applications and is a coeditor of the Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture. Briana completed a BA in Political Science at Utah State University and MPhil in Russian and East European Studies at Oxford. Her research focuses concentrate on Russian security affairs, weapons of mass destruction, emerging disruptive technologies, and strategic culture. 

Alexis Butler

Alexis completed a BSC in Computer Science at the University of Surrey, while working as a research engineer, as part of an AutoML and automated software engineering company. She has previously worked on automated software optimisation and synthesis research. Alexis’ research interests focus on the interface between the open source and industrial communities and its implications for supply chain security.

Stephen Cook

Stephen has completed an undergraduate degree in Computer Science BSC (hons) at York St John university. He then went on to complete a Masters in cyber security at Newcastle University, achieving a distinction. After graduating, he was a software developer at SAGE PLC working on wide range of projects.  He has recently been employed as a research assistant on the CyFer project at Royal Holloway University.  His main area of interest is IoT & Smart device security and privacy with a particular focus being on Medical IoT devices, and the application of machine learning techniques to improve the security and privacy auditing of these devices.  

Katy Craven

Katy has a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Central Lancashire and an MSc in the Mathematics of Cryptography and Communications from Royal Holloway, graduating in 2022 with distinction. Katy's main interest lies in time delay cryptography, and her master's dissertation focused on the development hash functions.

Xiaohui Ding

Xiaohui (Daisy) Ding holds a Bachelor's degree in Mathematical Physics from University of Waterloo, Canada and a Bachelor's degree in Information and Computing Science from Shandong Normal University, China. Following this, she pursued a Master's degree in Cybersecurity at Monash University in Australia, where her master's thesis centred on calculating injectivity for select post-quantum cryptography schemes.
Between her Bachelor's and Master's degrees, Daisy worked as a teacher for A-level Further Mathematics and AMC competitions. Subsequently, during the gap between her Master's and Ph.D., she worked as a cryptography researcher focusing on hardware arithmetic, including NTT acceleration, and exploring cryptographic techniques like FHE, MPC, and their applications on PPML.
Daisy possesses a broad range of interests in mathematics and cryptography. Her research primarily revolves around tight security proofs in the Quantum Random Oracle Model and lattice cryptanalysis and/or reductions. She  also plays CTF Crypto track in her spare time.

Arshia Dutta

Prior to joining the CDT, Arshia completed her graduation and post-graduation in Sociology, in India. During this time, she published two papers in the JU Journal and Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. She was also a Research Assistant in two projects funded by Boston University and IIT Kharagpur, respectively. In 2020, Arshia was a Policy Research Intern for the Department of School Education, Government of the Union Territory of Jammu, India. After her masters, she worked with ImpactDash, a Mumbai based CSR Consultancy firm where she was Field Manager and Project Head in 2022-2023. During this time, she took interest in the Computer Ethics research group in IIT Delhi and consulted on a body of Literature for Technicians at an undergraduate level. Her inclination towards Ethnography and Field Survey was developed in a departmental project which looked into the experience of the marginalised community in her university, as they tried to navigate a crisis with limited access to and understanding of ICT. 

Rebecca Jones

Rebecca completed her multidisciplinary BSc with the Open University whilst working a variety of jobs in community care, hospitality, and teaching in the UK, and abroad. Her MSc in Engineering at Cardiff University focused on space technology innovation. Rebecca has spent the last three years working within cybersecurity, data and digital development within the civil service. This cross governmental career gives Rebecca a wealth of experience in the way that cyber impacts the everyday, the practicality of modern cyber security for government, international collaboration, and citizen safety. She is interested in cyber security inequalities, the policy opportunities and challenges of emerging technologies, and the impact of cyber security on international collaboration and diplomacy.

Aikaterini Mavrona

Prior to joining the CDT, Katerina worked as a policy analyst based in Brussels researching EU policies on emerging and disruptive technologies (EDTs), the broader EU digital portfolio, as well as EU-NATO relations in cybersecurity and defence. She was also a Schuman trainee for the European Science Media Hub of the European Parliament Research Service. She holds a BSc in Politics and International Relations from the University of London, an MSc in Global Politics from the LSE, and an MSc in European Integration from the VUB-IES in Brussels. Before returning to academia to pursue her studies in international politics she worked in news reporting for more than ten years. She was a photojournalist for the Athens News Agency in Greece, and later worked as an analyst on foreign policy and defence contributing to a variety of news outlets. Her research interests focus on modes of international cooperation for the governance of digital technologies, as well as geopolitical contestation within global and regional Standard Setting Organizations in the fields of information security and EDTs.

Mbabazi A. Ntezi

Mbabazi completed an MA in International Cooperation and Development from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy, and a BA in Community Psychology from Makerere University, Uganda. Before her doctoral research, she contributed to research and advisory projects across sub-Saharan Africa in democracy and governance, development programming, climate action, and gender.
Her doctoral research examines the foundational elements shaping information security for activists in politically and socially complex environments where their demands contend with the state. Her research interests revolve around democratic processes, the politics of development, aid systems, and their intersection with information security, particularly in developing contexts.

Oliver Pearce

Oliver achieved a first-class BSc in Computer Science specialising in Information Security at Royal Holloway, University of London, he went on to work as a lead tester for Gartner. His areas of interest include binary analysis, system and software security and machine learning.

Connor Pfreundschuh

Connor has a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electronic Engineering from King’s College London. He then completed a Master of Science degree in Advanced Computing at King’s College London, graduating with a distinction. In his MSc thesis, Connor explored different methods for detecting and analysing potential hate speech on social media, specifically focusing on political fora on Reddit. His research interests lie in developing user-centred and verifiable security systems for IoT devices, particularly when such devices are in insecure environments.

Gabriella Williams

Gabriella has completed an undergraduate degree in Criminology & Sociology BSc (hons) at the University of Kent. She then went on to complete a master’s degree in cybersecurity at the same university. Her master’s dissertation focused on sexual harassment in the metaverse, examining the cultural, legal, and social implications of the way we understand criminality; criminalistic behaviour in virtual reality platforms, specifically in regard to the security and privacy issues surrounding the metaverse and virtual reality. After graduating, she was employed as a research associate at the University of Kent, investigating what type of impact the Summer Vacation Research competition had on students, with a particular focus on understanding how it had supported marginalized students, and the effect that it had on them. Gabriella’s area of interests lies in the criminological and sociological framework of cybersecurity, particularly on the issue of sexual harassment in the metaverse and virtual reality platforms and our understanding of how we define criminality in a technologically dependent society.

Benjamin Bencina

Prior to joining the CDT, Benjamin completed a BSc and a MSC in Pure Mathematics, both from the University of Ljubljana. After graduating, he was a TA at the University of Ljubljana, teaching Commutative Algebra, and a software developer at XLAB Research, working on EU projects.Benjamin's main interests lie in post-quantum cryptography and cryptanalysis. 

Mikaela Brough

Mikaela holds a BA from McGill University in Montréal and an MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford. Her research explores digital security practices and perceptions within activist groups operating in diverse cultural contexts. In particular, she is interested in the decision-making processes of at-risk groups when it comes to secure messaging applications and protocols. Most recently, she has been working on an ethnographic project exploring secure technology within the climate movement. She has previously published in other areas of UK-based qualitative social research in academia and the private sector.

MacGregor Cox

Macgregor completed his BA in Natural Sciences and Msci in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, focusing on influenza evolution and contentious science policy issues respectively. He then went on to teach Science and Maths at the King Solomon Academy in Westminster for a year; was a summer research fellow at the Cambridge Existential Risk Initiative (CERI), studying the communication of expert uncertainty in pandemic emergencies; and, worked for the Covid Genomics UK Consortium (COG-UK) studying efficacy of vaccines and therapeutics against novel SARS-COV-2 variants. He is interested in the intersection between expertise, policy making, and the public, especially how experts can increase the impact of their research by understanding how policy makers and the public frame cybersecurity issues.

Sophie Hawkes

Sophie recently completed her BSc in Mathematics at the University of Warwick, including an additional Erasmus year of study at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, Germany. She is interested in cryptography, in particular post-quantum cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies.

Cameron Jones

Cameron joined the CDT having attained a MSci with First Class Honours in Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London, favouring the Cyber Security modules. His main interest is in automated exploit discovery, with related interests in cryptography, malware analysis and program analysis.

Oisín Phillips

Oisín's background lies within the scope of Politics and International Studies, attaining a BSc from Ulster University in Politics with Criminology and an MA in International Security from the University of Warwick. Oisín's research interests surround global cyber-norms, cyber-diplomacy, and applying theories of the English School of and International Security to issues of cyber security.

Shubham Pawar

Shubham has completed his BS-MS dual degree from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) majoring in mathematics. His primary interest lies in post-quantum cryptography and cryptanalysis, while he also enjoys working on problems lying in other areas of theoretical computer science.

Faria Pitafi

Before joining the CDT, Faria obtained BA and MA in International Relations from Bilkent University; with a focus on civil-military relations, Islamization, and democratic erosion. She is currently interested in the intersection of geopolitics, nuclear deterrence and counterterrorism strategy, and cyber security.

Simon Pohmann

Simon completed a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science at the university of Passau in Germany, and then Oxford for a MSc in Mathematics and Computer Science. His main interests is the mathematics behind post-quantum cryptography. Up to now, Simon mostly worked with lattice-and isogeny-based cryptosystems.

Anete Poriete

Anete completed a MSc Cyberpsychology in Nottingham Trent University, MA in Communication Management in University of Wroclaw and an undergraduate in Business Psychology in RISEBA University. She has been working as an innovation and product researcher in a cybersecurity startup for past 2 years before joining the CDT. She is interested in human factors of cybersecurity, cyberpsychology, user experience and behaviour design.

Amir Rafi

After finishing his BSc in Computing at QMW, University of London, Amir worked as a software and web developer before pursuing his passion for teaching Maths, Science and Computing at secondary level. Prior to joining the CDT, he completed the MSc in Information Security at Royal Holloway in 2021, gaining a distinction. His research interests include media broadcasting security, smart cards and embedded devices, trusted execution environments, and OS- and firmware-level security.

Phil Sheriff

Prior to the CDT Phil spent 20 years working for both the UK and Australian governments, predominantly overseas, on a wide range of thematic and geographic areas. Prior to that he spent 7 years in the British Army. Phil has a degree in Physics from Oxford, an MA in Defence Studies from St Andrew’s, and has recently completed the MSc in Information Security from RHUL, being awarded a distinction. His research interest lies in the intersection and measurement of UK international stakeholder engagement and cyber capacity building.

Ethan Davies

The working title of Ethan’s thesis is "Blind Quantum Computing Instructed by a Classical Client". This looks at how a client with no quantum capabilities can delegate their computation to some vastly more powerful quantum server whilst still leaking as little information on the computation as possible. Ethan is currently looking at existing schemes and trying to improve resource consumption for the server.

Charlotte Hargreaves

Charlotte's research is hoping to address the role of physical space in cybersecurity in addition to exploring how under-represented groups (the homeless) experience cyber-security. Charlotte is currently working on a literature review and building relations with an organisation for data collection. Once this relationship is established, Charlotte will submit her ethics documents.
The working Title of Charlotte’s project is ‘Security risks and practices among the homeless in the UK: Assessing the impact of experiences of homelessness on digital security needs across urban and rural spaces’.

Rebecca Hartley

Rebecca’s research focuses on the development of place-based connected technology projects (smart cities, connected places and similar). The research explores factors shaping cyber security in these projects, with particular focus on the ideas and narratives connected to cyber security. Rebecca is currently completing some pilot study work to provide grounding for the PhD thesis.

Alex Hodder-Williams

Alex’s working title is “Formal methods applied to the security of a range of protocols”. Alex is working with Guido Schmitz on improving the methods used in formally analysing security protocols across a range of ecosystems. The research is in its very early stages but will potentially look at ways to improve the tools available in the automatic analysis sphere or working on a specific protocol area to develop specific analysis techniques.

Cherry Jackson

Cherry is continuing research into the GitHub Archive Program for their PhD and recently returned from Svalbard, one of their chosen field sites where they visited the Arctic World Archive, where GitHub stores its “cold” part of its archive. Cherry’s working title is “No Clouds on the Horizon: Archiving GitHub,” using GitHub’s archival programme as a focus for the following wider questions: How do we decide what knowledge to obtain and retain? How do we retain that knowledge?"

Oleksandra Lapiha

Sasha’s research topic is "Reductions between new lattice problems". Sasha is  currently writing up an idea for a particular reduction and aims to have enough content for her first paper.

Jessica McClearn

Jessica’s working title is ‘Digital Access in Post-Conflict Colombia’. Jessica is immersed in literature as she develops and designs her PhD thesis project which will consider themes of digital access and digital rights in the post-conflict context of Colombia. Jessica has submitted to top tier conferences based off the ethnographic research that was completed for her summer project in Beirut, Lebanon. 

Taylor Robinson

Since September 2022, Taylor has been reviewing literature surrounding her topic and has primarily been focused on narrowing her research questions and aims. Currently, she plans to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, focusing on security practices for female headed households or single mothers.

James Barr

James completed a BA in Politics and an MSc in Defence, Development and Diplomacy at Durham University; with a focus on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems and their impacts upon modern warfare. His current research interests centre around the relationship between conflict and information technologies. Specific areas of study include how mainstream media depicts and narrates issues of cyber conflict; and, in Mexico, how tools of communication and interconnectivity interact with and shape environments which are presently violent and relatively unstable.

Stephanie Itimi 

Stephanie’s working thesis title is ‘Uncovering the Everyday Security Targeted at Domestic Workers in Lagos, Nigeria’. Stephanie's research explores the lived security experiences of domestic workers in Lagos, Nigeria, focusing in particular on the relationship between surveillance and care in the context of domestic work. Stephanie uses ethnographic methods of exploration and has recently conducted her pilot fieldwork in Lagos over a two-week period and will return to Nigeria to conduct observational work as well as interviews with domestic workers and employers. 

Dan Jones

Dan’s working title is ‘Analysing Real-world Protocols for Secure Group Messaging’ which is an investigation into the state of secure group messaging as implemented in the real-world. Dan spent the first research year studying Matrix, a secure group messaging protocol used by over 60 million people (incl.European governmental organisations such as the German military). As part of this work, which was performed alongside Martin Albrecht, Benjamin Dowling from the University of Sheffield and Sofía Celi from Brave, they discovered a number of vulnerabilities in the implementation and specification. From these vulnerabilities they developed some proof-of-concept attacks. This work culminated in them presenting it for the Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Research Group at the IETF's London meeting and Blackhat Europe.

Elle Pearson 

Elle is working on data collection, and is in the process of negotiating access to a police force in England to explore the different types of data they use for their data-driven policing system. Elle is also arranging interviews with other organisations that share data with them whilst attending various events and trade shows that focus on policing and surveillance tools.
Working title: ‘How are data-driven policing systems constructed through systems of data gathering, classification, and categorisation?’

Giuseppe Raffa

Giuseppe’s title is ‘Serverless Computing and Linux Anti-Virus Software: Status Update’. Giuseppe’s serverless computing research has been focused on developing end-to-end examples of the novel static analysis pipeline that constitutes the main objective of his PhD project. In addition, to support the development of models and approximations to be used he has been working on the characterization of a dataset of serverless applications. The latter study has recently been submitted for publication and  Giuseppe additionally had a paper accepted for publication at one of the workshops of the IEEE BigData 2022 conference.

Emma Smith

Emma’s PhD project title is 'Distinct Difference Configurations and their application to Key Distribution in Wireless Sensor Networks'. At this stage, Emma is co-writing a paper entitled 'Subsets of free groups with distinct differences', which looks at the problem for the case when the sensor network has a tree-like structure. The next stage of the research will be to generalise these results to other layouts.

Nicola Bates

Nicola’s title is "Using quantitative analysis to aid decision making in the UK cyber domain" and looks at modelling various single attacker, multiple defender scenarios, in order to change inputs and analyse outputs to determine what knowledge can be extracted for use in network defensive strategies. Modelling from a bottom-up approach allows insight into the system and playing around with different variables allows the model to be used as a tool for understanding and reasoning.
Work uses operational strategies from the business implementational environment to give insights into strategic studies thinking in the area of cyber defence and deterrence. Insights gained can be used to explore how different policy choices would affect network defence.

Calum Bax

Calum's project is on disinformation detection. The tools and techniques that currently exist have limited ability to detect when false information is being spread, how and by whom on social media. This work uses data visualization and leverages the twitter platform to develop proof of concept tools and approaches to measure and study the spread of disinformation.

Natasha Buckley

Tash’s project, titled ‘ GCHQ: A journey from cyber security to cyber power (2009 – 2022)’  aims to conduct an exploration of the transition from cyber security to cyber power within the UK through a narratology of materials. Following the institution of GCHQ from 2009 to 2022, this thesis will attempt to conduct novel research investigating, through mixed methods, a transition of stance towards cyber power and explore the importance of this term, where it arose, where it is used, how it is being promoted and the strategy behind this change. Through an analytical lens of narratology and assemblage theory this thesis will explore how elite strategic practices take shape through a combination of strategy and materials and how relationships between key actors and conceptualisations of cyber and power affect this transitional process. Tash recently passed her upgrade and has moved into the research phase, with a project plan for the next 18 months of practical research and analysis.

Tabitha Ogilvie 

Tabitha studied maths at the University of Oxford for both bachelors and masters, focusing on number theory, combinatorics and foundations of mathematics. She is interested in cryptography and the creation of security protocols, but also keen to look into how individuals interact with cyber security. 

Wrenna Robson 

Wrenna is working towards her thesis titled “The use of computer-aided cryptography techniques in the development of high-assurance novel cryptography”. Wrenna is investigating the use of different formal methods arising from the field of computer-aided cryptography to increase confidence in designs and implementations of novel cryptography such as proposed post-quantum schemes. This is taking the form of a series of case studies, orientating mainly around the Classic McEliece scheme as a prototypical example and site of research.

Nathan Rutherford 

Nathan is currently looking at how we can use ARM Pointer Authentication (PAC) to provide data-flow-integrity (DFI) for Linux processes, and also provide a mechanism through which data pointers can be shared between processes without violating DFI. In the medium term, his thesis is aiming to look at how PAC can be used in combination with ARM Memory Tagging Extensions (MTE) to provide higher levels of security. Nathan’s long-term vision is to investigate how these hardware extensions can be shared across hardware devices using CXL to provide DFI in cross-device applications, such as GPU applications. PhD Thesis Title: ‘Next Generation Memory Safety for Heterogenous Systems: Sharable Security Primitives for Data Integrity on AArch64’.

Robert Choudhury

Robert is researching Android Sensor and their privacy threats. Rob is writing up and looking to submit his thesis in 2023.

Erin Hales

Erin is part-time and is working on three projects about FHE, mostly around understanding noise and hence suitable security and parameter choices. Two projects are nearing completion and the other one is aiming to be completed this year. Erin has one further project planned before writing up her thesis.

Jason Gray

Jason’s working title is ‘Malware Authorship Attribution: Exploring clustering of APT groups’. Using Tactics, Techniques and Procedures to identify malware capability for representing functions and extracting authorship features to observes trends amongst APT groups. Jason is concluding the research phase and will be moving into the write-up stage by the end of the year. Jason recently resubmitted a survey paper to a journal and alongside it published a dataset called APTClass. He is now using the dataset to answer research question on APT malware trends and trying to identify novel methods to compare and link the binaries.