Cyber Technology Insitute

AIR TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNICATION OVER ATN/IPS (ATMACA)

Nicola Wilkinson

Grant awarded:  1,965,583.75 EUR (Total EU Grant Awarded); DMU to receive 353,396.25 EUR

Funder: EU – HORIZON-SESAR-2023-DES-ER2-WA2-2

Project Leads: Raouf Hamzaoui (PI) and Feng Chen (Co-I)

The ATMACA (Air Traffic Management and Communication over ATN/IPS) project proposes an innovative solution that enables effective, seamless, interoperable air-to-ground datalink communication and digital flight monitoring and management through aeronautical telecommunication (ATN) based on the Internet Protocol Suite (IPS) within all domains of flight. ATMACA aims at supporting the “air-ground integration and autonomy” initiative in the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), which presents strategic roadmaps to achieve SESAR phase D “Digital European Sky” in the European ATM Master Plan 2020 edition. ATMACA proposes a beyond the state-of-the-art IP-based datalink communication solution by introducing an application-layer mobility management for ATN and enabling commercial of-the-shelf equipment. It will also provide a next generation human-machine interface (HMI) that will process higher quality data, enable interactions with existing and future aeronautical applications and services, and meet the needs of end-users. The ATMACA solution will be validated through real-time simulations and real-time monitoring tests by considering relevant applicable SESAR key performance areas and indicators, as well as industry standards. The consortium consists of a balanced mixed of universities and industrial partners (an air navigation service provider, an airline, and a research and consultancy firm specialized in HMI design) to ensure the project meets its objectives.

Philleted Phish – detecting phishing emails using sentiment analysis

Nicola Wilkinson

Grant awarded: £31,000

PI: Trevor Wood, supported by Iryna Yevseyeva, Vitor Basto Fernandes, and Eerke Boiten

Funder: CyberASAP, Innovate UK

It is estimated that cyber-attacks cost UK businesses £37bn per year, most of which ends up in the hands of organised crime. It is also estimated that around 90% of these attacks start with a phishing email.

Many phishing emails have been relatively easy to spot in the past as they contain poor spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. However, with generative AI now being more accessible, it is easier to make phishing emails more realistic and remove these obvious markers. Moreover, these phishing emails are designed to bypass spam filters without being detected.

Philleted Phish will detect phishing emails, whether they attempt to trick victims into visiting a phishing website or perform some other action, such as transferring money to the attacker’s bank account or providing information useful to a larger social engineering attack. Unlike current phishing email detection software, it can be used by domestic users, micro-businesses, and SMEs without requiring expensive and specialised hardware.

Blockchain Considered Harmful

Nicola Wilkinson
Dr Eerke Boiten

There are always new technologies around in my discipline: computer science, and usually they are introduced with a really useful application in mind. Sometimes we discover a little later that the downsides of such technology outweigh the advantages. Facial recognition is getting close to that point, and the online advertising industry is trying hard to convince us that browser cookies are in that category too.

What is much rarer is a technology that is shown to be harmful before anyone has demonstrated that it could be useful. In my view blockchain technology (if you want to be technical and precise: public non-permissioned blockchains
– including those of bitcoin and Ethereum) has now reached that point.

In my keynote at the 2018 Computing conference, “No, let’s NOT put it on the blockchain” (see video), I carved out a number of application areas where blockchain would definitely not be suitable: personal data of any sort for legal reasons; long term valuable data because encryption might not protect forever; successful applications (with lots of users and activity), as the chain already can’t keep up. While this gave a strong hint that blockchain might be mostly useless or redundant, and since then I haven’t seen any convincing successes of blockchain, while many companies have pulled out of blockchain projects, by now I’m convinced it is worse than that: it’s actually harmful.

There are two main reasons for that. One is cryptocurrency. People don’t participate in blockchain projects if there’s no reward for it, and giving them cryptocurrency is the normal way to do that. But to cover the real-world costs (e.g. computer time, see next point) somebody needs to insert some real money into the system by buying cryptocurrency. That gains them nothing except the hope that the value will go up over time – which can only happen if more people buy into this. For an academic explanation of the difference between proper money and a pyramid scheme fraud, please
ask an economist. The second reason is ecology, which is also outside my expertise. The bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains use the “proof of work” method to reward participants in reaching agreement on the state of the world.

Currently this takes as much energy as a medium-sized country to process a few transactions per second worldwide. My discipline is full of people who believe more responsible alternatives exist, but while that may be true, the scale of the ecological disaster is now such that we can’t afford to wait for them before we switch this one off.

Now just to work out how to be effective in getting this technology abolished …