Swinburne cybersecurity project receives ARC funding

With more and more sensitive data, such as information about customer identities, being hosted on the cloud, businesses are increasingly worrying about their data integrity.

A project to help safeguard the Australian community in  the cyber world has been funded by a $450,000 Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project grant.

“Privacy protection for user data hosted in cloud environments is at risk throughout all stages of the user information lifecycle,” says Deputy Director of Swinburne’s Data Science Research Institute, Professor JinJun Chen, who leads the project.

“Current approaches mainly focus on a specific case at a certain stage. This project aims to investigate those challenges systematically and establish innovative solutions to enable full lifecycle privacy protection on the cloud.”

Cyber security is a strategic priority for Australia's national security. The Australian Government recently released a discussion paper on the topic, Australia's 2020 Cyber Security Strategy: A call for views.

According to the paper, $2.3 billion was stolen by cyber criminals from Australian consumers in 2017, while there were 53,474 reports of cybercrime  in the 2017-18 financial year and another 64,528 in 2018-19.

More than 960 data breach notifications were also made from April 2018 to March 2019, 60 per cent of which were malicious or criminal attacks.

Loss of businesses’ sensitive data can cause serious economic, commercial and social consequences such as business fraud.

“Current data auditing approaches for verifying data integrity lack sufficient efficiency and security, and hence cannot provide timely warning for removing potential data loss threats,” says Professor Chen.

“Our project aims to lead to timely warning and significantly reduce or avoid data loss incidents. In turn, this will bring significant economic, commercial and social benefits to the Australian community.”

In October, Swinburne was named as a leading institution in theoretical computer science in The Australian’s 2019 Research magazine and Professor JinJun Chen was named among the nation’s top achievers and recognised as a leader in that field. The list was compiled by research analytics firm League of Scholars using data from Google Scholar.

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