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Information and Networked Systems Security Research (INSS)

Welcome to the Information and Networked Systems Security (INSS) Research at Macquarie University.

It is clear that the Internet is transforming the way we live and the recent decades have witnessed dramatic developments in information and communication technologies. Along with the phenomenal growth in technology enabled information economy has been a growth in computing technology related crimes. By almost any reasonable standard, the lack of security and privacy on the Internet is no longer at socially acceptable levels. From consumer threats (such as identity theft) to enterprise threats (e.g. loss of personally identifiable information data) to government threats, there is little doubt that sophisticated adversaries are causing malicious effects. These are posing some fundamental challenges in the design and management of secure, trustworthy and dependable networked systems and applications. Issues such as how does one user trust another user or a service provider over the Internet, how to design systems that are trustworthy and dependable and reason about them, how to capture dynamic changes in policies, how does a user enjoy a trust enhanced experience enabling him/her to make more reliable and effective decisions online have become key priorities in this information driven economy.

The overall aim of the Information and Networked Systems Security Research (INSS@MQ) is to achieve fundamental advances in the theory, design and management of models and techniques that would enable secure and dependable computing information systems and services. An important characteristic of INSS is its research capabilities and expertise covering both theory and practice in addressing the challenges that arise in achieving secure systems in a heterogeneous mobile distributed environment involving distributed systems, wireless, broadband and peer to peer networks, mobile devices and distributed information services. Currently we have research projects in the areas of web services security, trusted computing, secure virtualization, mobile agents security, wireless security, mobile ad hoc and sensor networks security, denial of service attacks, peer to peer computing security and formal security techniques and applied cryptography. A key feature security research is its multi-faceted nature, with security acting as a thread that sews multiple technologies, applications, models and polices together. It is increasingly evident that challenges do not come in self-contained neat packages (be they in healthcare or transportation or e-commerce) and it is critical for research in technology and policy should go hand in hand to deal with complexity and inter-dependability and achieve the desired outcomes.

INSS has researchers from the Computing Dept at MQ as well as collaborative researchers from other institutions internationally.

We look forward to interacting and working with you in many of the challenges in security, trust and privacy in the information age.

Professor Vijay Varadharajan
Microsoft Chair Professor in Innovation in Computing
Director: Information and Networked Systems Security Research (INSS@MQ)