Digital Catapult Researcher in Residence Project

Dr Simon Parkinson has recently undertaken a Researcher in Residency at the Digital Catapult Centre in Bradford. There are many Digital Catapult Centres through the UK and their purpose is to facilitate knowledge transfer from research to UK businesses and citizens.

Simon’s work with the Catapult centre is to develop the cyber-security readiness of Yorkshire SME and citizens. That is to develop their understanding of security risks, as well as provide them with practical advice and software tools to increase the security of their systems and to be less vulnerable. Simon’s primary area of research is in the use of Artificial Intelligence within cyber security, particularly in the area of security controls and vulnerability assessment.

The project was to develop a mechanism to detect a phenomena with access controls called permissions creep. Permissions creep appears as a result of when employees change job role and their permissions (directories, software, printers, etc.) are elevated. Organisations often have systematic processes in place for allocating permissions for new users, but ad hoc permissions are often made during role changes. After many successive ad hoc changes, a user’s permissions may have become high, allowing them unrestricted access to system resources, which could have significant implications if their account was to be compromised or they accidently execute malicious software (viruses, ransomware, etc.). Detecting instances of permission creep is very challenging as determining what is an excessive level of permissions requires a high-level of expert knowledge. The project resulted in a novel tool, which utilises an unsupervised learning algorithm, to automatically detect instances of permissions creep.

Future information and software tools are available at: http://selene.hud.ac.uk/scomsp2/creeper