Aisha Junejo

Biography

Dr Aisha Junejo is a lecturer in Cyber Security in School of Computer Science and Mathematics at Keele University. Before joining Keele, she worked as a postdoctoral research associate in Adaptive Emerging Systems Engineering (AESE) group in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. She received her PhD degree in Computer Science from City, University of London, UK, in 2019. She studied software engineering in undergraduate and Information Technology in postgraduate from Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Pakistan. She also worked as a visiting lecturer and software engineer at different public and private organizations.

Her research focuses on different areas of cybersecurity, data and information security, intrusion detection systems, and trust modelling. She is interested in designing lightweight security solutions for resource-constrained sensors and IoT devices. Her work spans various domains, including sensor-based systems, IoT, edge computing, and cloud computing.

She was a proactive member of the former PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity, a consortium of over 120 industrial and government partners, along with 24 research institutions. She has well-established connections with academics and industry experts in the IoT sector.

She is currently leading the 6G-FINESSE project funded by EPSRC and DSIT under Federated Telecoms Hub 6G Research Partnership programme. She also secured funding from Innovate UK for CyberASAP and KTP projects. She is serving as the reviewer of highly reputable journals and conferences. She is a Member of IEEE and EPSRC peer review college. She is a fellow (FHEA) of Advance HE (UK).

Research and scholarship

Dr Junejo’s research focuses on the security of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), Cyber Physical Systems (CPS), and Internet of Things (IoT) in general. She believes these systems can be protected by employing lightweight cryptography, intrusion detection, and trust modelling. She is currently working on the security of 6G communication technologies. She has previously worked on the security of high value goods as a part of Logistics 4.0 project funded by Petras. It was a collaboration with Tate Museum, Arm Holdings, Ordinance Survey, Constantine Ltd, and Momart. She also worked on the security of sensor-based systems as part of the S4 project funded by EPSRC. Her research interests include but are not limited to security, privacy, and trust of CPS, WSN systems, cloud computing, fog computing, and applied cryptography.

She is interested in designing lightweight security solutions for resource-constrained sensors and IoT devices. She has been working on physical layer security (PLS) encryption schemes. PLS based schemes employ the randomness of the wireless channel to derive a shared secret key between a sender and receiver. The PLS schemes are more efficient than the classical (AES and DES) symmetric encryption schemes. Currently, she is working to design a group key scheme based on channel randomness derived from received signal strength indicator (RSSI), channel state information (CSI), and sensor measurements.

Her other research interests include designing trust models for distributed systems, namely, WSN, cloud computing, and fog computing. She believes that the resilience and dependability of future systems rely on integrated solutions that consider safety, security, privacy, and trust together. She is also an advocate of security at design time philosophy and believes it must be the top priority for every security solution.

Research grants

Principal Investigator: 6G-FINESSE research project funded by UKTIN - Federated Telecoms Hub 6G Research Partnership Funds (£393,825). Partners: Imperial College London, Queens Mary University of London, University of Surrey, and Satellite Applications Catapult.

Principal Investigator: PLS-IIoT: Leveraging Physical Layer Security for Securing Industrial Internet of Things Systems funded by Innovate UK CyberASAP (£10,089).

Principle Investigator: Internal seed funding from Keele SCM and DSI (£2000) for investigating the security and privacy issues in Internet of Medical Devices.

Principle Investigator: RDF School fund (£1200) for hardware. Dr Aisha’s research publications can be found at Google scholar, Researchgate

Research themes

• Lightweight cryptography – encryption and access control techniques
• Physical layer security
• Intrusion detection using machine learning
• Social engineering using machine learning
• Research interests
• Secure data communication
• Wireless sensor networks
• Cyber physical systems
• Internet of things
• Edge computing and cloud computing
• Trust modelling

Teaching

CSC-40104 Human Factors of Cybersecurity
CSC-40120 Cryptography
CSC-20043 Computational and Artificial Intelligence I