Weisheng Si
Director of Academic Program - Postgrad ICT
Senior Lecturer in Networking
School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Sciences, WSU
Post: Bldg ER, Parramatta South Campus, Parramatta, NSW 2150
E: w.si a-t WesternSydney.edu.au
This research group mainly conducts research on real-world complex networks such as the Internet, the IoT networks, the power grids, the online social networks, etc. The issues studied include Security, Robustness/Reliability, Green Networking, Quantum Networking, etc. We apply various kinds of theories to studying networks when relevant: Complex Networks, Machine Learning, Quantum Communication, Computational Geometry, etc.
Network topology (i.e., how nodes are connected by links in a network) is vital for the operation of networks. Cyberattacks to bring down the nodes or links in networks have surged in recent years. By leveraging the Complex Networks theory, this project aims to:
The outcomes of this project can be broadly applied to infrastructure networks such as enterprise backbone networks, power grids, transportation networks, IoT network for smart cities, etc.
There have been very limited efforts in studying software development and software attacks from the lens of Game Theory. In this project, Game Theory is incorporated into software development life cycle to suggest useful strategies for software developers and security testers, interacting in a repetitive manner, to achieve secure software efficiently. The research will aid the software development by identifying more proactive ways to write secure code, where a software developer gets more hands-on help from a security tester in finding and fixing vulnerabilities in software.
A qubit is a basic unit for carrying information in quantum computing. Quantum networks are for transmitting qubits among computers. Due to the special phenomena possessed by qubits such as superposition and entanglement, quantum networks can support many applications not achievable by classical computing such as Quantum Key Distribution and Clock Synchronization. Quantum networks are now in the beginning stage and will cover more and more nodes in the Internet gradually. When almost all nodes in the Internet are covered by quantum networks, the so-called 'Quantum Internet' is achieved. In realizing Quantum Internet, we face the following challenges:
In this project, you can work on any algorithms and protocols tackling the above challenges.
With the proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT), IoT networks have become popular targets of cyber-attacks. One category of attacks is based on node centrality, and removes the node with the highest centrality in each round of attack. Here the centrality can be any centrality measure such as degree centrality, betweenness centrality, etc. For this category of attacks, there currently exist two strategies: initial and adaptive. In the initial strategy, node centralities will only be calculated initially and will not be recalculated during each round of attack, while in the adaptive strategy, node centralities will be recalculated. It has been shown in the literature that the adaptive strategy is generally more effective than the initial strategy for a centrality measure. This project proposes a new strategy called the largest component strategy which further outperforms the adaptive strategy. Moreover, this new strategy supports using current-flow versions of betweenness centrality and closeness centrality as the centrality measure in the attacks, while the adaptive strategy does not.
The security of web applications is critical due to their prevalent use in our daily lives. It is a common practice to run web vulnerability scanners to detect security holes in web applications. There are many such scanners available today. To evaluate the effectiveness of these scanners, people often run these scanners against a benchmark web application with known vulnerabilities. This thesis presents our results on the effectiveness of two popular web vulnerability scanners based on a benchmark developed by OWASP, a prestigious non-profit web security organisation.