Siraj Shaikh

Siraj Ahmed Shaikh is Professor of Systems Security at the Centre for Transport and Mobility Research at Coventry University, where he leads the Cyber Security Group involved in automotive and transport security. 

From February 2015 till May 2016, he was seconded to the Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN), which is the innovation network in Britain. He served as cyber security lead for the KTN coordinating activities across academia, industry and national policy. From March 2015 till March 2016, he was also seconded to HORIBA MIRA, as part of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s industrial secondment scheme.

In 2016, Siraj co-founded CyberOwl, which is a VC-backed commercial venture involved in developing early warning system for cyber threats, cyber-physical platform health and prognostics. CyberOwl is currently part of the UK’s 1^st GCHQ Cyber Accelerator.

Siraj is currently involved in the EPSRC-Funded project “ECSEPA”, jointly with Cardiff University, investigating evidence-based policy-making for cyber security, working with policy partners including UK’s GCHQ/NCSC and FCO. 

Siraj has been involved in research, development and evaluation of large-scale distributed secure systems for over seventeen years. His doctoral and post-doctoral research involved design and verification of security and safety-critical systems. He was recently involved in an EPSRC-Funded research project investigating collusion attacks on smart phone platforms. Led by City University (UK), it also involved Swansea University (UK) and Intel Security as an industrial partner.

From 2013 to 2014, he investigated safety data modelling for the UK Rail Industry, funded by the RSSB. From 2011 to 2013, he was involved with the development of an intelligent control and guidance system for unmanned logistics vehicles for unmanned distribution capability. This work was funded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) of UK over two phased projects, and jointly led by Siraj and Prof. Dobrila Petrovic.

From 2010 to 2012, he worked with the transport and logistics sector in the UK investigating efficient and reliable supply chain networks for consignment delivery. This initiative was led by Ricardo and funded by Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and EPSRC.

In 2011, he participated in the Pairing Scheme by The Royal Society of UK, as part of which he worked with Civil Servants at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). In 2010, he served as a EPSRC-Funded Policy Fellow to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) of Her Majesty’s Government (HMG), advising on secure storage and transmission of data from field-based rapid diagnostics devices.

From 2007 to 2009, he worked as a Research Fellow at Cranfield University, at the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, and from 2006 to 2007 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Institute of Software Technology of the United Nations University, Macau SAR China. Prior to academia he worked in the industry developing smart-card based access control systems for use by HMG.  

He is the Vice-Chair for the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Technical Committee 6 on Communication Systems, and also a member of the Developing Countries Support Committee (DCSC) of IFIP.

His paper titled “A Deployment Value Model for Intrusion Detection Sensors” won the Best Paper Award at the 3rd International Conference on Information Security and Assurance (ISA 2009), held in Seoul, Korea in 2009.

He has over eighty peer-reviewed research publications and has successfully supervised three Doctoral and two MRes students to completion. He is a Chartered Fellow of BCS and also Chartered Scientist (CSci).

He has served on the Program Committee (PC) for several conferences and has been the PC Co-chair for the 3^rd, 4^th, 6^th and 8^th International Workshop on Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification (OpenCert) in 2009, 2010, 2012 and 2014 respectively. He has co-edited a special issue of the journal ‘Science of Computing Programming’ for selected contributions from the OpenCert workshops (2014).

I am currently a Professor of Systems Security at the Centre for Mobility and Transport at Coventry University. My main research interest lies in systems security, essentially at the intersection of cyber security, systems engineering and traditional computer science. I address a range of problem domains including monitoring of insider and stealthy attacks, automotive and transport cybersecurity, and software assurance. My research brings together a mix of research methods including formal methods (process algebra), (Bayesian) statistical analysis and others. I have been involved in research, development and evaluation of large-scale distributed secure systems for nearly twenty years. My doctoral and post-doctoral research involved design and verification of security and safety-critical systems.