The Waikato Cyber Security Research Group (CROW)

Discover how our Cybersecurity research makes systems on the Internet safer. Learn how we increase security and privacy by advancing the understanding of attacks and designing novel defences.

Cyber security (or simply systems security) is the practice of protecting systems, networks, and data from digital attacks, unauthorised access, damage, or theft. It involves implementing technologies, processes, and controls to secure access to information and services, ensuring its confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Cyber security is cross-sectional to computer science, ranging from hardware security to social engineering techniques.

Our group, Cybersecurity Researchers of Waikato (CROW), tackles pressing research problems and covers some of the most relevant areas in Cybersecurity, such as (alphabetical order):

Applied cryptography
Honeypots, IDSes, and active sensing for attack characterisation
Cyber deception
Data provenance and sovereignty
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack and mitigation
Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS) Security
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) Security
Internet measurements and experimentation
Internet scanning and network security assessment
Machine Learning Approaches for Cybersecurity
Malware Analysis and Detection, including Ransomware
Privacy in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)
Routing security
Software-defined networks (programmable data planes) for Network Security

The key research group personnel is four faculty with expertise on the topics previously, complemented by a strong team of Research Programmers, PhD students, Master of Cybersecurity (MCS) students, and Honours students.

Our team expertise supports a range of cyber security papers/courses at all levels, including:

The infrastructure of our research group includes a spacious lab space regularly attended by the team, a powerful server to crunch large datasets (e.g. network traces and system logs), and a cluster of 40+ Internet-facing machines that we use for experimentation and measurements, including in demonstrations and practical work part of our lectures.

Since 2014, we have organised the NZ Cybersecurity Challenge (opens in a new tab), helping to spark interest in Cybersecurity in young students as well as provide a forum for the discussion of cybersecurity trends in NZ. It has attracted a large number of students every year, of all levels, industry participants, and sponsors, which help us grant awards for the winners.

Together with New Zealand industry partners, multi-national companies and international consortia, we work on discovering and disclosing vulnerabilities that expose user data to dangers in both systems and networks.