Considered sensitive information by the ISO/IEC 24745, biometric data should be stored and used in a protected way. If not, privacy and security of end-users can be compromised. Also, the advent of quantum computers demands quantum-resistant solutions. This work proposes the use of Kyber and Saber public key encryption (PKE) algorithms together with homomorphic encryption (HE) in a face recognition system. Kyber and Saber, both based on lattice cryptography, were two finalists of the third round of NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization process. After the third round was completed, Kyber was selected as the PKE algorithm to be standardized. Experimental results show that recognition performance of the non-protected face recognition system is preserved with the protection, achieving smaller sizes of protected templates and keys, and shorter execution times than other HE schemes reported in literature that employ lattices. The parameter sets considered achieve security levels of 128, 192 and 256 bits.

Nowadays, improving the reliability and security of the transmitted data has gained more attention with the increase in emerging power-limited and lightweight communication devices. Also, the transmission needs to meet specific latency requirements. Combining data encryption and encoding in one physical layer block has been exploited to study the effect on security and latency over traditional sequential data transmission. Some of the current works target secure error-correcting codes that may be candidates for post-quantum computing. However, modifying the popularly used channel coding techniques to guarantee secrecy and maintain the same error performance and complexity at the decoder is challenging since the structure of the channel coding blocks is altered which results in less optimal decoding performance. Also, the redundancy nature of the error-correcting codes complicates the encryption method. In this paper, we briefly review the proposed security schemes on Turbo codes. Then, we propose a secure turbo code design and compare it with the relevant security schemes in the literature. We show that the proposed method is more secure without adding complexity.

Cyber threats can cause severe damage to computing infrastructure and systems as well as data breaches that make sensitive data vulnerable to attackers and adversaries. It is therefore imperative to discover those threats and stop them before bad actors penetrating into the information systems.Threats hunting algorithms based on machine learning have shown great advantage over classical methods. Reinforcement learning models are getting more accurate for identifying not only signature-based but also behavior-based threats. Quantum mechanics brings a new dimension in improving classification speed with exponential advantage. The accuracy of the AI/ML algorithms could be affected by many factors, from algorithm, data, to prejudicial, or even intentional. As a result, AI/ML applications need to be non-biased and trustworthy.In this research, we developed a machine learning-based cyber threat detection and assessment tool. It uses two-stage (both unsupervised and supervised learning) analyzing method on 822,226 log data recorded from a web server on AWS cloud. The results show the algorithm has the ability to identify the threats with high confidence.

This research investigates efficient architectures for the implementation of the CRYSTALS-Dilithium post-quantum digital signature scheme on reconfigurable hardware, in terms of speed, memory usage, power consumption and resource utilisation. Post quantum digital signature schemes involve a significant computational effort, making efficient hardware accelerators an important contributor to future adoption of schemes. This is work in progress, comprising the establishment of a comprehensive test environment for operational profiling, and the investigation of the use of novel architectures to achieve optimal performance.