Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT)

最近媒体充斥着关于下载和共享音乐文件的报道，这是一场打击整个全球音乐产业经济生存能力的危机。这是一个令人吃惊的提醒，提醒我们在民事和刑事领域所面临的安全挑战，因为我们不断地进入一个所有信息技术都完全连接的世界，这是由Web 2.0的发展和快速吸收所促进的。这一技术及其后继技术将以十年前难以想象的方式彻底改变社会。然而，随着收益的积累，隐私、信息安全以及易受外部攻击等方面的主要威胁也随之而来。在犯罪领域，威胁的范围很广，从窃取信用卡信息的小罪犯，到制造麻烦的黑客活动分子，他们攻击组织以达到进一步的政治目的，再到阴险的网络恐怖分子，他们攻击战略目标的方式与恐怖分子炸毁和摧毁国家基础设施的方式相同。CSIT项目的核心是使当前和未来的所有IT解决方案都安全的长期挑战。创新科技中心将成为世界级的研究及创新中心，在安全资讯科技方面取得重大突破，并在创新及商业化方面取得令人振奋的发展。从最广泛的意义上讲，信息技术涉及使用电子计算机和计算机软件来转换、存储、分析、传输和检索信息。因此，IT领域涵盖了数据处理的各个方面，从使用家用个人电脑（其宽带连接日益无线化）的银行业务，到控制和管理世界航空、海事和电信系统的复杂系统。任何在自己的家用电脑上感染过病毒、蠕虫、木马或间谍软件的人都可以很容易地证明，为了保持隐私、完整性和信任，安全是任何IT系统的基本要求。当电子传感器设备和闭路电视摄像机联网并与计算机处理相结合时，IT就成为物理基础设施保护领域的强大工具，包括火灾监控、资产跟踪和入侵检测。因此，虽然IT安全本身通常是防御病毒程序自动攻击的问题，但资产保护IT是协助人类操作员的工具。用于基础设施系统的IT系统本身必须是安全的，尤其是因为个人生物识别数据正越来越多地作为解决方案的一部分推出。IT系统被分析成一堆独立的层，按照国际标准定义。CSIT的员工在这些层面的学术研究方面处于世界领先地位，这一属性反映在四个最初的学术研究领域：数据系统、网络、无线和智能监控。然而，CSIT的一个关键特征是，由于其历史，它理解最终采取整体或系统工程观点的必要性，以便研究和开发完整的安全it系统，这无疑比其层的总和更大。许多工业伙伴参与CSIT就是证明。CSIT的驱动目标是战略性地将英国工业定位在安全IT领域的前沿，因为该领域是一个关键的、新兴的、快速增长的领域，对社会的安全和保障有更广泛的好处。作为女王大学的一部分，CSIT有着非常成功的产业合作和衍生公司的形成记录，因此，CSIT很好地建立了强大的商业和学术合作伙伴关系，创造了持续的知识转移机会，具有可实现的短期研究转移里程碑，再加上令人兴奋的重大突破机会和随后的英国工业商业机会。

Recently the media has been awash with reports on the downloading and sharing of music files, a crisis which strikes at the economic viability of the entire global music industry. This is a startling reminder of the security challenges posed, in both the civil and criminal domains, as we move relentlessly to a world in which all Information Technology is fully connected, facilitated by the development and rapid uptake of Web 2.0. This, and its successors, will radically transform society in a way unimaginable a decade ago. However, with the accrued benefits come major threats in terms of privacy, security of information and vulnerability to external attack. Threats range, in the criminal domain, from the petty criminal stealing credit card details, through trouble making hacktivists, who attack organisations to further political aims, to the sinister cyber-terrorists, who attack strategic targets in the same way that terrorists would bomb and destroy national infrastructure. At the heart of the CSIT project is the perennial challenge of making all of the IT solutions, of today and tomorrow, secure. CSIT will be a world-class Research and Innovation centre coupling major research breakthroughs in Secure Information Technology with exciting developments in innovation and commercialisation.Information Technology in the widest sense deals with the use of electronic computers and computer software to convert, store, analyze, transmit, and retrieve information. So, the IT field covers every aspect of data processing from the banking using one's home PC with its (increasingly wireless) broadband connection, through to the complex systems which control and manage the world's aviation, maritime and telecommunications systems. As anyone who has had a virus, worm, Trojan or spyware on their home PC can readily testify, security is an essential requirement for any IT systems in order to retain privacy, integrity and trust. When electronic sensor devices and CCTV cameras are networked and combined with computer processing, IT then becomes a power enabling tool in the field of physical infrastructure protection, which includes fire monitoring, asset tracking and intrusion detection. Thus while IT security itself is often a matter of defending against automated attack by viral programs, IT for asset protection is a tool to assist the human operator. The IT systems used for infrastructure systems must themselves be secure not least because personal biometric data is increasingly being rolled out as a part of the solution.IT systems are analysed into a stack of independent layers along lines defined in international standards. CSIT staff are world leaders in academic research in these layers, an attribute which is reflected in the four initial fields of academic research: data systems, networks, wireless and intelligent surveillance. However a key distinguishing feature of CSIT is the fact that it understands, because of its history, the necessity to ultimately take a the holistic, or systems engineering, perspective in order to research and develop the creation of complete secure IT systems, which undoubtedly are greater than the sum of their layers. The involvement of many industrial partners in CSIT bears witness to this.The driving goal for CSIT is to strategically position U.K. industry at the forefront of the field of secure IT because this field is a critical, emerging and rapidly growing sector with its wider benefits for the safety and security of society. Embedded within Queen's University, with its very successful record of industrial collaboration and spin-out company formation, CSIT therefore lends itself well to a strong business and academic partnership, creating a continuous flow of knowledge transfer opportunities, with realizable shorter term milestones for transfer of the research, coupled with exciting opportunities for major breakthroughs and ensuing commercial opportunities for UK industry.