Project Description
Currently there is an urgent need for a sustainable digital route to zero-carbon road transport by facilitating low-carbon charging of electric vehicles (EVs) to meet the 2030 target to ban all new petrol and diesel cars, and 2050 Net-Zero. The UK government has announced £80 million ($99.7m) of investment to develop the next generation of EVs. Cyber threats and attacks targeted on critical infrastructure such as EV, can hamper the critical operations and ongoing services. The advanced cyber-attacks can also lead to cascading effect and propagating to other components of the system, which can further create disruption to the system. Therefore, it is needed to identify associated cyber risks, and estimate and quantify them to understand their potential impact and adverse behaviour on EV infrastructure in order to recognise their adverse behaviour.
The School of Computer Science & Informatics has a strong emphasis on cyber security research due to recent grants, and also hosts the Airbus Centre of Excellence for Cyber Security and NCSC approved Academic Centres of Excellence in Cyber Security Research (ACE-CSR). Students attend research workshops and conferences, skills training through the Doctoral Academy, and have an opportunity to work with industry. A healthy research environment promotes research ideas and collaborations, and opportunities for networking through interdisciplinary work with the School of Engineering (Energy/EV research group). The students will be part of the Sustainable Transport Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training Hub benefiting from training and activities, and can also interact with DTE Network+.
Objectives: The objectives of this work are: (1) Analysing advanced cyber threats and attacks on EV infrastructure; (2) Developing propagation model using to understand and describe how cyber-attacks are propagated in EV eco-system using simulation approach; and (3) Developing a stochastic method to estimate and quantify cyber risks associated with the EV infrastructure.
Indicative Deliverables:
- Surveys on risk, impact and state of the art: cyber risks for EV infrastructure;
- Identifying potential cyber threats, ways of attacks and risks to EV infrastructure, threat modelling;
- Develop — propagation models and methods to estimate and quantify cyber risks;
- Academic technical publications
Team:
Dr Neetesh Saxena
Prof Liana Cipcigan
Prof Omer Rana
Funding Information
This is a self funded project.
Eligibility Requirements
A 2:1 or above Honours undergraduate degree or a master’s degree, in computing or a related subject. Applicants for whom English is not their first language must demonstrate their proficiency by obtaining an IELTS score of at least 6.5 overall, with a minimum of 6.0 in each skills component.
Application Process
Please contact Dr. Neetesh Saxena to discuss this project.
For an overview of the programme, tuition fees and other information, visit the website.
Read the How to Apply tab, and in the Apply box choose qualification Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science & Informatics, mode of study Full-time. In the research proposal section of your application, specify the project title and supervisors of this project, and in the funding section, select the “self-funding” option.
