Tim Watson

Loughborough University | Lough

This systematic literature review explores the scholarly debate around public perceptions and behaviors in the context of cybersecurity in connected places. It reveals that, while many articles highlight the importance of public perceptions and behaviors during a cyberattack, there is no unified consensus on how to influence them in order to minimi...

As part of the National Cyber Strategy, the government is working to ensure connected places technology is adopted in a secure and sustainable way. To support this work, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) commissioned PETRAS to conduct a literature review. The focus of this review was to explore how public perceptions of conn...

The concept of twinning an operational physical system with a functional replica is not new, having been practiced in the space sector for over 50 years. Advances in digitalisation have created opportunities to extract data, obtain insights and achieve greater situational awareness of a physical system’s performance. Increasing interest in the conc...

The maritime sector is a vital component of the global economy. Its international nature supersedes state boundaries and any disruption in its operations could have consequent and collateral global effects, affecting the socio-economic wellbeing of regions, states and peoples. The increasing adoption of digitalisation in the sector, primarily incre...

This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) on cybersecurity in the automotive industry. Using the R tool Bibliometrix, a total of 537 papers related to cybersecurity and the automotive industry were analyzed. First, our paper contributes to academia by showing that research on this topic is grouped into four clusters that correspond t...

There is an increasing demand for Internet of Things (IoT) networks consisting of resource-constrained devices executing increasingly complex applications. Due to these resource constraints, IoT devices will not be able to execute expensive tasks. One solution is to offload expensive tasks to resource-rich edge nodes, which requires a framework tha...

Resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices are executing increasingly sophisticated applications that may require computational or memory intensive tasks to be executed. Due to their resource constraints, IoT devices may be unable to compute these tasks and will offload them to more powerful resource-rich edge nodes. However, as edge nod...

Maritime cyber security is an emerging issue that requires immediate attention, according to the International Maritime Organization (IMO). Feedback received from global shipping professionals indicate that a common threat to the industry, such as cyber security, is dealt with differently among industry practitioners around the globe. Data collecte...

The Forensic Science Regulator has the role of setting quality standards for forensic science in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) in England and Wales. The current requirement is for organisations carrying out digital forensics to gain accreditation to the international standard ISO/IEC 17025 and the Forensic Science Regulator's Codes of Practice...

Historically, Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) were largely isolated from conventional digital networks such as enterprise ICT environments. Where connectivity was required, a zoned architecture was adopted, with firewalls and/or demilitarized zones used to protect the core control system components. The adoption and deployment of ‘...

Experts believe that the Internet of Things (IoT) is a new revolution in technology and has brought many advantages for our society. However, there are serious challenges in terms of information security and privacy protection. Smart objects usually do not have malware detection due to resource limitations and their intrusion detection work on a pa...

This paper presents the development and implementation of a location‐based, lightweight peer‐assisted authentication scheme for use in wireless networks. The notion of peer‐assisted authentication is based upon some target User Equipment (UE) seeking authentication and access to a network based upon its physical location. The target UE seeks authen...

A novel method of cross-device tracking based on user typing behaviours is presented. Compared with existing methods, typing behaviours can offer greater security and efficiency. When people type on their devices, a number of different factors may be considered to identify users, such as the angle and distance of contact point to the centre of the...

Information technology has brought with it many advantages for organisations, but information security is still a major concern for organisations which rely on such technology. Users, whether with intent or through negligence, are a great source of potential of risk to information assets. A lack of awareness, negligence, resistance, disobedience, a...

The protection of organisational information assets requires the collaboration of all employees; information security collaboration (ISC) aggregates the efforts of employees in order to mitigate the effect of information security breaches and incidents. However, it is acknowledged that ISC formation and its development needs more investigation. Thi...

The global usage of more sophisticated web-based application systems is obviously growing very rapidly. Major usage includes the storing and transporting of sensitive data over the Internet. The growth has consequently opened up a serious need for more secured network and application security protection devices. Security experts normally equip thei...

The rapid growth in the volume and importance of web communication throughout the Internet has heightened the need for better security protection. Security experts, when protecting systems, maintain a database featuring signatures of a large number of attacks to assist with attack detection. However, used in isolation, this can limit the capability...

The interaction between discrete components of Internet of Things (IoT) and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is vital for a collaborative system. The secure and reliable use of Cruise Control (CC) with Cloud and Edge Cloud to achieve complete autonomy for a vehicle is a key component and a major challenge for ITS. This research unravels the...

Attribution relies largely on technology; however, experts who rely on technology may inadvertently inject their own biases when evaluating findings. Attackers are now deceiving the analysts, by misleading them through the use of deceptive data and exploiting defender and analyst biases. One set of biases that can be objectively measured is cultura...

The massive increase of spam is posing a very serious threat to email and SMS, which have become an important means of communication. Not only do spams annoy users, but they also become a security threat. Machine learning techniques have been widely used for spam detection. Email spams can be detected through detecting senders' behaviour, the conte...

Cities face serious challenges that affect competitiveness, sustainability and their occupants’ safety & security. In response, investment is made in city infrastructure projects. Given the complexity of the systems architecture, and interactions between physical and cyber domains, this paper shows how a multi-disciplinary approach can be adopted t...

With the rapid growth of the Internet, there are an increasing number of computer threats and attacks. The prevalence of zero-day attack activities has given rise to the need to prevent these attack activities from spreading and damaging the computer system. As such, intrusion detection system (IDS) should satisfy complex requirements and must be d...

With the rapid growth of the Internet, there are an increasing number of computer threats and attacks. The prevalence of zero-day attack activities has given rise to the need to prevent these attack activities from spreading and damaging the computer system. As such, intrusion detection system (IDS) should satisfy complex requirements and must be d...

With the rapid growth of the Internet, there are an increasing number of computer threats and attacks. The prevalence of zero-day attack activities has given rise to the need to prevent these attack activities from spreading and damaging the computer system. As such, intrusion detection system (IDS) should satisfy complex requirements and must be d...

We are living in a world which is continually evolving and where modern conflicts have moved to the cyber domain. In its 2010 Strategic Concept, NATO affirmed its engagement to reinforce the defence and deterrence of its state members. In this light, it has been suggested that the gamification of training and education for cyber security will be be...

Society is increasingly dependent on the safe and secure operation of a wide range of complex physical-cyber systems. The consequences of failure of these systems can be very serious, particularly where they form part of a nation's critical national infrastructure. There has been a trend to make greater use of commercial-off-the-shelf technology in...

Faced by serious challenges affecting competitiveness, sustainability and the safety and security of their inhabitants, cities' authorities are investing in complex infrastructure projects to make more intelligent and efficient use of resources. Investments include improved asset management through greater use of building information modelling (BIM...

In the first four months of 2014, two major vulnerabilities were announced affecting operation of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, which is used by applications to secure Internet communications. The `goto fail' bug affected Apple's iOS and OS X software and the `Heartbleed' bug affected versions of the OpenSSL software. Whilst the Appl...

The recursive deterministic perceptron (RDP) is a generalization of the single layer perceptron neural network. This neural network can separate, in a deterministic manner, any classification problem (linearly separable or not). It relies on the principle that in any nonlinearly separable (NLS) two-class classification problem, a linearly separable...

This paper studies the reliability of geometric features for the identification of users based on hand biometrics. Our methodology is based on genetic algorithms and mutual information. The aim is to provide a system for user identification rather than a classification. Additionally, a robust hand segmentation method to extract the hand silhouette...

Digital investigation methods are becoming more and more important due to the proliferation of digital crimes and crimes involving digital evidence. Network forensics is a research area that gathers evidence by collecting and analysing network traffic data logs. This analysis can be a difficult process, especially because of the high variability of...

Modern Society is becoming increasingly dependent upon ever-more complex systems. We are in a situation where a security breach can have an impact on individuals, institutions and critical services, such as power and communication systems. This reliance, along with the possibility of remaining both anonymous and geographically separate from an intr...

Current research is improving the quality and efficiency of digital investigation methods due to the continuous proliferation of digital crimes. This includes the use of software tools that can help with digital investigations. A novel method for the analysis and visualisation of network forensics traffic data, based on growing hierarchical self-or...

In recent years the number of cyber-attacks has dramatically increased, affecting military, government, business and home users. For example, the UK Ministry of Defence claims to have blocked and investigated over 1000 serious cyber-attacks in 2010 while in 2011 Detica reported that the cost of cybercrime in the UK is estimated to be £27 billion pe...

Digital crimes are a part of modern life but evidence of these crimes can be captured in network traffic data logs. Analysing these logs is a difficult process, this is especially true as the format that different attacks can take can vary tremendously and may be unknown at the time of the analysis. The main objective of the field of network forens...

The increasing complexity of today's information technology (IT) together with our dependency upon it, has led to a situation in which a security breach not only has effects for individuals but can also affect the availability of critical services (power supply, communication) or result in significant financial loss. Criminals and terrorists want t...

Frequency-dependent selection (FDS) refers to situations where individual fitnesses are dependent (to some degree) on where the individual’s alleles lie in the proximate allele frequency distribution. If the dependence is negative – that is, if alleles become increasingly detrimental to fitness as they become increasingly common at a given locus –...

If your company's got something worth stealing, someone's going to try to steal it, so you need to protect your assets – and that includes protecting your information from hackers. The best way to catch the hackers at their work is to learn to think like them, and that means making a full commitment to flexible, innovative IT that really gets the s...

While artificial neural networks (ANNs) are undoubtedly powerful classifiers their results are sometimes treated with suspicion. This is because their decisions are not open to inspection – the knowledge they contain is hidden. In this paper we describe a method for extracting and representing the knowledge within an ANN. Mappings between inputs an...

Providing a genetic algorithm (GA) with the ability to control population diversity has been shown to be advantageous in both static and dynamic environments. Previous work has demonstrated that if the mutation rate of individuals is under genetic control then the optimal mutation rate rises in proportion to the speed of environmental change. This...

Kin selection is a theory that attempts to explain the apparently altruistic behaviour in nature. It suggests that self-sacrifice in order to save kin is understandable through consideration of the probabilities of occurrence of an individual's genes in its close relatives. Thus altruism can be explained without recourse to `group selection'. Howev...

With the increasing size and complexity of modern database systems the need for sophisticated methods of information retrieval is essential. Many institutions are ignorant of vital information stored in their databases because the query that would produce it has not been run. The goal of all data mining systems is to uncover significant information...

Footsteps is a two-player board game in which the objective is to move a counter, one step at a time, to one's own end of the board, by spending points. Though the game is simple in conception, it is unusual and strategically quite complex, and it captures the essence of the impor-tant tactical dilemma of whether to at-tack or to sit back and then...