About Me
I am a Principal Engineer at the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), at Queen's University Belfast. My research interests include cryptographic engineering, embedded security and FPGA design, with a focus on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) and hardware cryptographic accelerators, including for quantum resilient encryption schemes. My role at CSIT is to contribute to the commercialisation and technology transfer of multi-disciplinary research projects within CSIT and external partners, as well as to assist with the application, and delivery of, externally funded projects from sources such as Horizon 2020, EPSRC and Innovate UK.
I hold a PhD in Engineering from University College Cork, and a B.Eng in Electrical & Electronic Engineering from the same institution.Away from security, I like to run & cycle, and am (unsuccessfully) trying to add swimming to that list as well.
News
Aug 2019
Three new collaborative papers accepted with SCA Secure and Updatable Crypto Engines for FPGA SoC Bitstream Decryption and A Large Scale Comprehensive Evaluation of Single-Slice Ring Oscillator and PicoPUF Bit Cells on 28nm Xilinx FPGAs to be published at ASHES 2019, and A Flip-Flop Based Arbiter Physical Unclonable Function (APUF) Design with High Entropy and Uniqueness for FPGA Implementation in IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing.
Feb 2019
Attended the second spring school of the Research Institute for Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems (RISE), hosted at CSIT and which included a range of talks from both national and international speakers. The agenda can be found here.
Feb 2019
Went on a 3-day Applied Physical Attacks and Countermeasures for Embedded and IOT Systems Training Course by Joe FitzPatrick (@securelyfitz) of SecuringHardware.com.
Dec 2018
Gave a talk titled From Connected Toys to Nuclear Power Plants – Why Hardware Security Matters at an IoT Belfast event on Cyber Security.
Nov 2018
Attended the first annual conference of the Research Institute for Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems (RISE) at the NCSC headquarters in London.
Oct 2018
Visited Purdue University for the final meeting of the Study on secure key hiding technology for IoT devices (KeyHAS) project.
Sep 2018
Attended the Conference on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems (CHES) this week in Amsterdam for four days of crypto implementation talks.
Aug 2018
A new joint paper On the Energy and Computational Cost of Message Authentication Schemes for GNSS, has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine.
Aug 2018
Our collaborative paper with Fraunhofer AISEC and NUAA, A Theoretical Model to Link Uniqueness and Min-Entropy for PUF Evaluations, has been accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Computers as a short paper. A link to the paper can be found here.
Jul 2018
I’ve been upgraded to a Principal Engineer at CSIT, where my focus will now be to provide engineering support to the Data Security Systems research group.
Jun 2018
Spent a week at BT Tower in Belfast doing hands on work and exam prep for the EC-Council Certified Ethical Hacker v9 (CEHv9) course, resulting in the passing of the exam at the end of the week.
May 2018
Online at last! New personal homepage website built using Jekyll and hosted on GitLab pages. The layout is based on the default Jekyll minima theme, with icons from Font Awesome, and references generated by DBLP and BibBase. I hope to update content, as well as visual aesthetics, semi-regularly as time/skills allow.