PETRAS panel at CISCO security conference

At the recent CISCO security conference, SecCon 2017, four academic members of PETRAS led an invited panel discussion entitled ‘Security and Privacy for the Internet of Things’.

The event held in London on the 13th of September is CISCO’s largest cross-company annual security conference. It is seen as a must-attend for those working within security, both within CISCO and their customers and partners. The day was attended by 226 representatives from 17 nationalities.

The gathering provided an excellent opportunity for industry exposure of our work and enabled critical responses on the specific requirements and challenges of IoT from a broad industry gathering. 

Prof. Michael Huth, Prof. Emil Lupu, Prof. Klauss Moessner and Dr Haithan Cruickshanks formed the panel. They gave an introduction to PETRAS as well as their own research areas followed by an in-depth discussion on security and privacy topics relating to IoT including: Connected Transport Systems (CTS) and Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAV), IoT in Public Spaces, IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems, Liability Sharing among Manufacturer, Owner and Retailer, AI and ML to Enable fully Autonomous Systems, Applicability of Blockchain to IoT, Calculus of Risk, Security and Usability Trade-offs.

Rafael Mantilla Montalvo, principal engineer at the Security and Trust Organisation of Cisco Systems said: “I was so happy to see the engagement from the audience, we ran out of time to ask all the questions! The session provided an excellent education from PETRAS on what the important questions in this area are.”

Discussing the importance of PETRAS’ work to CISCO Rafael said: “IoT is a core area of investment for CISCO with significant spending to develop a hardware and software portfolio within the IoT solution space. However, there are areas of security that we realise contain challenges that require advanced research. For this reason, we created the security and privacy for the internet of things initiative as part of the security and trust organisation within CISCO. This evidences the importance to us of security and privacy and understanding the gaps that exist in this space. In pursuing this we reach out to centres of excellence and naturally, we found PETRAS.

“There is an incredible synergy between what PETRAS is doing and what CISCO intends to do in this area of research. We compliment each other extremely well, and CISCO values the access to the incredible talent and researchers in PETRAS. The collaboration is so close that we thought it was important to make the entire CISCO security community aware of PETRAS and that was the intent of this panel session. We are very excited for the second cycle of projects as they began and look forward to working further with PETRAS.”