Senior Research Associate: Generalised Context Privacy

We are seeking a candidate to develop techniques to proactively ensure the security of systems being directly observed by an adversary. This post is part of a 2-year EPSRC funded project to develop generalisable techniques to mitigate threats to systems caused by adversaries observing the actions systems take. The reality is many systems are easily observable by an adversary (such as with cyber-physical systems) and also undertake sensitive activities which are desirable to obscure from an adversary. 

This role will involve research to:

Quantify the information loss of systems being observed by an adversary,Developing novel techniques to change the behaviour of a system to reveal less information to an observing adversary, andIdentify how best to change a system to reveal less information. 

This project aims to do away with the time-consuming activity of developing custom observation privacy techniques per system and instead secure a variety of systems by applying the developed generalised techniques. 

Key duties of this post include:

Conducting original research to model arbitrary systems and quantify the amount of information revealed to an adversary, to develop novel context privacy techniques, and to test the efficacy of these techniques in practice.Publishing high quality and impactful publications. Providing mentorship and collaborative research with PhD students.Interacting with academic and industry partners within the project.

You will have a PhD in Computer Science or equivalent with strong programming skills and experience in cyber security, distributed systems, and/or privacy quantification techniques such as information theory or differential privacy.

For more information, candidates are strongly encouraged to first contact Dr. Matthew Bradbury (m.s.bradbury@lancaster.ac.uk).

The School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University offers a highly inclusive and stimulating environment for career development, and you will be exposed to a range of further opportunities over the course of this post. We are committed to family-friendly and flexible working policies, as well as the Athena SWAN Charter, which recognises and celebrates good employment practice undertaken to address gender equality in higher education and research. 

You will join us on a fixed term contract for a duration of two years.

This is a full-time position expected to start January 2025, or as soon as possible thereafter.

Closing Date: 06 Jan 2025

Department: Research

Salary: £39,105 to £45,163 (Full time, indefinite with end date)