• System Security Lab

Systems Security Lab

The Systems Security Lab is a research group at the University of Oxford, headed by Professor Ivan Martinovic. Our work covers a range of topics in authentication, Internet of Things, malware, machine learning and large-scale infrastructure.

As part of our research we are a founding member of OpenSky, a participatory sensor network which aims at collecting real-world air transportation communication data, such as ADS-B/Mode-S at large scale (covering over 720,000 km² in Europe). It offers insights into the ADS-B communication channel, characterising typical reception quality and loss patterns in the real world. It is intended to serve researchers from different areas as a solid basis for realistic evaluations and simulations.

Transportation and Infrastructure

Security of infrastructure systems (automotive, satellite and aviation)

Internet of Things

Research solutions to secure the entire life cycle of IoT devices.

Biometrics

Exploring novel biometrics (such as eye movements, touch dynamics or PPG) and analysing the security of existing systems.

Malware and Network Security

Research on Malware analysis, detection and classification.

Recent News

July 19, 2021

Papers accepted to EuroUSEC and USENIX

We are proud to report that we have two conference papers accepted:

’Plug-and-Play: Framework for Remote Experimentation in Cyber Security’ (Klaudia Krawiecka, Jack Sturgess, Alina Petrova, Ivan Martinovic) has been accepted to the European Symposium on Usable Security (EuroUSEC 2021), which will take place virtually on 11-12 October. We will link to the open access version of the paper when available.

In addition, visiting researcher/SSL alumna Bushra AlAhmadi and the Computer Science department’s Louise Axon have received confirmation of the acceptance of their paper ’99% False Positives: A Qualitative Study of SOC Analysts’ Perspectives on Security Alarms’ to the 31st USENIX Security Symposium in 2022 - more details to come.

July 13, 2021

Paper accepted to TOPS and Best Paper at CPSS

SSL is proud to announce two recent achievements:

Paper accepted to TOPS

We were recently notified of the acceptance of our paper “#PrettyFlyForAWiFi: Real-World Detection of Privacy Invasion Attacks by Drones” (Simon Birnbach, Richard Baker, Simon Eberz, Ivan Martinovic) to the ACM’s Transactions on Privacy and Security journal.

Best Paper Award at CPSS’21

Our paper “You talkin’ to me? Exploring Practical Attacks on Controller Pilot Data Link Communications” (Joshua Smailes, Daniel Moser, Matthew Smith, Martin Strohmeier, Vincent Lenders, Ivan Martinovic) won best paper at the Cyber-Physical System Security Workshop, held in conjunction with ACM AsiaCCS virtually in June 2021.

February 24, 2021

Papers accepted to IEEE S&P and USENIX

SSL is proud to be represented at both IEEE Security & Privacy and the USENIX Security Symposium this year.

Freddie Barr-Smith will be presenting his paper (co-authored with Xabier Ugarte-Pedrero, Mariano Graziano, former SSL member Riccardo Spolaor and SSL head Ivan Martinovic) on “Survivalism: Systematic Analysis of Windows Malware Living-Off-The-Land” at IEEE S&P 2021, which runs from 23-27 May; and at the USENIX Security Symposium, held on 11-13 August, Giulio Lovisotto will be presenting “SLAP: Improving Physical Adversarial Examples with Short-Lived Adversarial Peturbations.” This has been co-authored with SSL’s Henry Turner, Ivo Sluganovic and Ivan Martinovic, as well as SSL alumnus Martin Strohmeier.

Both conferences will be taking place virtually and videos will be posted here when available.

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