We are happy to announce that Dr Arshad Jhumka from the department's Artificial Intelligence research theme has been awarded a grant as PI, under the PETRAS SRF programme, to develop and deploy a trusted edge-based Internet of Things (IoT) network. IoT networks are expected to be deployed as solutions to problems in a wide variety of contexts, from non-critical applications such as smart city monitoring to providing support to emergency services such as critical communications. As IoT devices are resource constrained, execution of resource-hungry applications will be offloaded to edge networks for quick response. Such an infrastructure is open to cyber-attacks and needs to be resilient to attack.

The UK's infrastructure is increasingly a connected collection of IoT systems. This is a good thing but it is vital that we ensure the resilience of these systems, particularly to hazards and threats. This project builds on existing work in trust and reputation and will develop trust algorithms in a resource-constrained IoT network for task offloading. This will help critical applications determine which resources can be trusted to perform their tasks and re-evaluate this when the system is under attack.

— Prof Tim Watson, PETRAS Co Investigator and Director of the WMG Cyber Security Centre

This 18-month £160K project will run in close collaboration with three industrial partners and the team includes Dr Matthew Bradbury as RCoI (CS) and Prof Tim Watson (WMG) as CoI.