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Security Research Group

Security Research Group



Dr Christina Thorpe

Image for Dr Christina Thorpe

Head of Cybersecurity

Email: christina.thorpe@tudublin.ie

Tel: +353 1 885 1119

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2359-883X

Qualifications

  • 2012 -  PhD in Computer Science, University College Dublin (Thesis: Adaptive Mechanisms for efficient Content Distribution over IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks)
  • 2005 - BSc (Hons) in Computer Science, University College Dublin.

Teaching Subject Areas

  • Undergraduate: Network Security, Distributed Systems, Business Continuity and Cloud Security
  • Postgraduate: Digital Forensics and Business Continuity Management

Research Interests

  • Privacy
  • Network Security
  • Machine Learning
  • Performance Engineering
  • Networking

Current / Recent Research Projects

  1. Unicef Technology Coalition: N − Light for Child Sexual Abuse Material. I am the co-PI for the N-Light project. National agencies ISPCC and the national Hotline.ie agency are partners on the project, which aims to produce a technology AI tool for identifying patterns of child grooming and abuser activities. I am co-supervising a postdoc and a research assistant/software developer.
  2. EI Comm Fund: VoIP Quality Assurance Over SDN: I was the Principal Investigator on a collaborative project between ITB and UCD. Cloud Stream is a commercialisation fund of approx. €380,000 awarded by EI to enable us to commercialise our approach to advanced monitoring of enterprise VoIP services over SDN. Stage 1 of the project started in Jan 2016 and stage 2 began in October 2016.
  3. Lero Research Centre: (1) Online Meeting Happiness: I supervised the input of 4 MSc interns working in the area of online meeting happiness. We developed 4 prototypes for gesture recognition using the leap motion and kinnect, voice recognition for voice-initiated actions, and collaborative brainstorming and affinity group using semantic distance calculations. (2) Security in Vehicular Networks: I supervised a PhD student working in the area of Vehicular Network Security, focusing initially on ‘black hole’ attacks. (3) Privacy Preserving Cloud Storage: I supervised a PhD student working in the area of secure and private Cloud storage. We proposed a new Oblivious RAM scheme which supports shared and distributed Cloud storage access. (4) Replication Management in Big Data Systems: I supervised a PhD student working in the area of smart data balancing for large scale distributed file systems. We developed a new approach for resource and access-based data balancing in a big data processing cluster
  4. Lero CSET: (1) Testing the Cloud: Testing Large Scale Distributed Systems is a non-trivial problem, that pre-2013, had not yet been fully explored by the research community. I led the organisation of a workshop on “Testing the Cloud” in 2013 (http://ttc2013.ucd.ie) co-located with the Internal Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA). We built on this early success with TTC2014 (http://ttc2014.ucd.ie). During this work, I supervised the research input from 1 PhD and 2 MSc students. (2) Application Deployment and Testing in the Cloud: I collaborated with several researchers from UCD and Nante to develop a domain specific language for automatic application deployment in the Cloud, this work yielded a workshop paper, I supervised the research input of 1 PhD student. (3) Privacy Preserving Data Publishing: I supervised a PhD student working in the area of privacy preserving data publishing. We developed several metrics to evaluate the quality of Value Generalisation Hierarchies (VGHs) used in K-Anonymisation algorithms. Our metrics provide an accurate means of evaluating (apriori) the utility of the data that will be achieved after anonymisation. (4) Mutation Testing In 2015, I began collaborating with researchers from UCD and INSA Lyon to investigate mutation testing with the view of improving the performance. We developed a tool to compare the performance of existing mutation generator tools to enable us to identify the deficiencies in the process. During this work, I supervised the research input of 1 MSc student.
  5. FAME SRC: (1) Managing End − to − End Services Using SDN: I managed a team of three PhDs and four MScs during this period. We successfully developed an Open-Flow SDN for IPTV service delivery and are subsequently worked on metrics and mechanisms for VoIP. This work yielded several papers and patents in collaboration with IBM Dublin and IBM Tivoli.

 Current and Recent Research Supervision

  • Postdoc TU Dublin Started 2022: N-Light AI-based Tool to Detect Patterns of Online Child Abuse (Dr Vuong Ngo)
  • Research Assistant Started 2022: N-light (Rahul Gajula)
  • PhD TU Dublin Started 2022: A Novel Deep Learning Approach to Fraudulent Document Detection for Digital On-boarding Services (John Magee)
  • Research Assistant: CloudStream (David Smith, Patricia Murphy, Martin Zuber)
  • MSc TU Dublin Graduated 2016: Development of an Automated Test Framework for Improved Efficiency in VPN Device (Conor Bristow)
  • L9 30 − credit TU Dublin: Over 50 cyber security research projects supervised since 2011. Consisting of a broad range of topics including Network Security, DevSecOps, Digital Forensics, IoT, and Machine Learning.
  • PhD UCD Graduated 2021: Privacy Preserving Secure Cloud Applications with Access Pattern and Metadata Leakage Prevention (Alexandre Pujol)
  • PhD UCD Graduated 2021: Replication Management for Large Scale Data Intensive Clusters (Himli Egemen Ciritoglu)
  • PhD UCD Graduated 2016: Enhancing the Utility of Anonymized Data in Privacy Preserving Data Publishing (Vanessa Ayala Rivera)

Selected Recent Publications

Journal

  • A. Pujol, L. Murphy and Thorpe, C., ”FedORAM: A Federated Oblivious RAM Scheme,” in IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 187687-187699, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3027516.
  • Thorpe, C., J. Tobin and L. Murphy, ”An ISO/IEC 7816-4 Application Layer Approach to Mitigate Relay Attacks on Near Field Communication,” in IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 190108-190117, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3031979.
  • Ciritoglu, H. E., Murphy, J. and Thorpe, C. ”HaRD: a heterogeneity-aware replica deletion for HDFS.” Journal of big data 6, no. 1 (2019): 94.
  • Pujol, A., Magoni, D., Murphy, L. and Thorpe, C., 2019. Spying on Instant Messaging Servers: Potential Privacy Leaks through Metadata. Transactions on Data Privacy, 12, pp.175-206.
  • Ayala-Rivera, V., McDonagh, P., Cerqueus, T., Murphy, L. and Thorpe, C., 2017. Enhancing the utility of anonymized data by improving the quality of generalization hierarchies. Transactions on Data Privacy, 10(1), pp.27-59.
  • C.Thorpe; L. Murphy, ”A Survey of Adaptive Carrier Sensing Mechanisms for IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks,” Communications Surveys & Tutorials, IEEE, vol.PP, no.99, pp.1,28, doi: 10.1109/SURV.2014.031814.00177
  • R. de Fréin, C. Olariu, Y. Song, R. Brennan, P. McDonagh, A. Hava, C.Thorpe, J. Murphy, L. Murphy, and P. French. ”Integration of QoS Metrics, Rules and Semantic Uplift for Advanced IPTV Monitoring.” Journal of Network and Systems Management (2014): 1-36.

Conference

  • Leahy, Darragh, and Thorpe, Christina. ”Zero Trust Container Architecture (ZTCA): A Framework for Applying Zero Trust Principals to Docker Containers.” International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security. Vol. 17. No. 1. 2022.
  • Ekoramaradhya, Manasa, and Thorpe, Christina. ”A Novel DevSecOps Model for Robust Security in an MQTT Internet of Things.” International Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security. Vol. 17. No. 1. 2022.
  • Miglani, Jitesh, and Thorpe, Christina. ”Employing Machine Learning Paradigms for Detecting DNS Tunnelling.” European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security. Academic Conferences International Limited, 2021.
  • Phadke, Pranav, and Thorpe, Christina. ”Analysis of API Driven Application to Detect Smishing Attacks.” European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security. Academic Conferences International Limited, 2021.
  • Ciritoglu, H.E., Murphy, J. and Thorpe, C., 2020, February. Importance of Data Distribution on Hive-based Systems for Query Performance: An Experimental Study. In 2020 IEEE International Conference on Big Data and Smart Computing (BigComp) (pp. 370-376). IEEE.
  • Homan, D., Shiel, I. and Thorpe, C. ”A New Network Model for Cyber Threat Intelligence Sharing using Blockchain Technology.” In 2019 10th IFIP International Conference on New Technologies, Mobility and Security (NTMS), pp. 1-6. IEEE, 2019.
  • Ciritoglu, H. E., Saber, T., Buda, T. S., Murphy, J. and Thorpe, C. ”Towards a better replica management for hadoop distributed file system.” In 2018 IEEE International Congress on Big Data (BigData Congress), pp. 104-111. IEEE, 2018.
  • Ciritoglu, H.E., Batista de Almeida, L., Cunha de Almeida, E., Buda, T.S., Murphy, J. and Thorpe, C., 2018, April. Investigation of replication factor for performance enhancement in the hadoop distributed file system. In Companion of the 2018 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (pp. 135-140).
  • Tobin, J., Thorpe, C. and Murphy, L., 2017, June. An approach to mitigate black hole attacks on vehicular wireless networks. In 2017 IEEE 85th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring) (pp. 1-7). IEEE.
Image for Dr Christina Thorpe