Boost for cyber security collaboration

The Director of Deakin University’s Centre for Cyber Security Research has been named a Changjiang Scholar, one of only 52 academics from around the world to receive the accolade this year.

Professor Yang Xiang will use the award as an opportunity to collaborate with universities and industry in China to produce important research outcomes in cyber security for Deakin.

The Centre for Cyber Security Research, which sits within Deakin’s School of Information Technology, works with industry and government through collaborative research projects to provide protection from major cyber security threats.

“The Changjiang Scholar Award is highly regarded by Chinese universities as a recognition of excellence,” Prof Xiang said.

“This will open up new opportunities for Deakin to collaborate on cyber security projects with partners we may otherwise have not had access to.”

The Changjiang Scholar Award (also known as the Yangtze River Scholar Award) is the highest academic award issued to an individual by the Chinese Ministry of Education. It is conferred based on the awardee’s research contributions to global innovation.

The selection committee recognised Prof Xiang’s excellence in cyber security research, particularly his work on developing a robust traffic classification system; an innovative and efficient polymorphic malware classification system; and a novel generic framework for three-factor authentication in distributed systems – the first that is effective in both theoretical and practical perspectives.

Prof Xiang is also known for his significant contribution to cyber security research in developing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) defence and IP trace-back system that can trace malicious attacking sources in real hardware as well as tracing many more sources than current trace-back systems.

Under the Changjiang Scholar Award, Prof Xiang will receive a professorship from Xidian University, one of China’s top universities with a focus on research in science innovation, electronics and information technology.

“Xidian University has strong capabilities in different subareas of cyber security,” Prof Xiang said.

“I hope to work with them on projects that will be beneficial to Deakin and to Australia, such as data driven cyber security, physical system security and large scale attacks detection.”

Deakin is among the world’s top 101-150 universities for Computer Science, according to the 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities, with its cyber security research a key factor in the ranking.