Internet Privacy and Security Analytics

Programs Available
PhD

Opening Date
21 Jul 2020 12am AEST

Scholarship available to
International

The candidate will conduct high-quality research activities within the Optus Macquarie University Cyber-Security Hub, led by Prof. Dali Kaafar, to research on Cyber security and Privacy-Preserving Technologies including but not limited to:

• Internet privacy and security analytics, to automatically detect and quantify privacy violations and security threats in the Web and Mobile Apps. The candidate will exploit active and passive measurements and design pipelines to automatically detect, quantify and highlight security and privacy threats. They will use big-data approaches, automatic crawling, and machine learning as the fundamental building blocks to identify malicious activities, security vulnerabilities and leaks of private personal information.
• Machine learning security and privacy analysis, to quantify the information leakage of AI platforms, as well as the associated security risks under adversarial settings. The candidate will:
  • Identify privacy and security risks in Machine Learning algorithms, focusing on sensitive real-world applications such as biometric recognition, and
  • Propose novel defense approaches for trustworthy, private, and secure machine learning.

The candidate will work effectively as part of a multi-disciplinary research team, to undertake independent scientific investigations and carry out associated tasks under the guidance of senior Researchers and Academics.

Availability
This scholarship is available to eligible candidates to undertake a PhD (3-year) program.

Scholarship Components
The scholarship is comprised of the Tuition Fee Offset and a Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarship (MQRES) Living Allowance/Stipend.

The stipend component of the scholarship is currently valued at AUD $28,092 per annum (2020 rate, tax exempt).