Simon Birnbach awarded UK Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship

Simon Birnbach, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher, has been awarded a UK Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering. The fellowship will help aid his project on securely fusing cooperative and non-cooperative data for maritime domain awareness.

While Simon is a Junior Research Fellow here at Kellogg, he is also a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Systems Security Lab of Professor Ivan Martinovic. His project explores fuses satellite imagery with self-reported ship locations and wireless signal data to enable maritime surveillance systems to help uncover advanced attacks and irregular activities at sea.

Simon specialises in the security of cyber-physical systems, with a focus on smart home, aviation, and aerospace security. His recent research has involved the development of a transferable fingerprinting scheme to protect legacy data links and onboard data buses used in aviation, and he has co-supervised DPhil students working on topics including satellite security, IoT and wearables security, behavioural biometrics, and network malware detection.

The fellowship provides funding to outstanding early career researchers working in areas of interest to the intelligence, security and defence communities, providing a vital link between these communities and academia. The National Protective Security Authority, Department for Transport, Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Home Office, and the National Cyber Security Centre are several organisations recognised as part of the UK Intelligence Community for this scheme.

Simon says:

I am honoured to receive this prestigious fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering. This fellowship will allow me to address critical challenges in the automated exploitation of AIS and SAR data fusion for maritime domain awareness (MDA). The vulnerabilities inherent in the unauthenticated AIS protocol and the limitations of low-resolution SAR imagery present significant obstacles. By grounding our automated systems in a thorough security analysis, we can better understand how these vulnerabilities impact data fusion. My research will facilitate the transition to increasingly automated MDA systems, enabling operators to make informed decisions based on higher-quality data. As maritime threats continue to rise and attackers adapt their strategies to exploit the limitations of current monitoring systems, the importance of access to high-quality and trustworthy data for MDA will only grow. I look forward to collaborating with experts from the IC community to advance our capabilities in maritime security.