Andrew Simpson

Andrew Simpson

Associate Professor

Governing Body Fellow, Kellogg College

T: 01865 283514

Themes:

Security

Completed Projects:

Interests

Much of my research over the past five years or so has been driven by one overarching theme: the development of models and technologies to facilitate assured, appropriate data sharing and aggregation in complex environments. To this end, I am interested in the following:

Security economics
Issues of data security and privacy
Models and frameworks for dynamic, context-sensitive access control
Usable models for privacy-preserving data mining
Formal modelling

Technologies we have developed include the sif middleware framework for the secure aggregation of data within heterogeneous environments, the Gauge analysis tool, and a policy tool for modelling and testing RBAC and XACML access control policies prior to deployment. Our evolving access control system combines all of these in support of assured, dynamic accesss control.

Other long standing interests include:

Privacy and confidentiality
Safety-critical systems
The relationship between security and safety
The application of formal description techniques (Z, CSP, Alloy) to the modelling and analysis of critical systems
Security education
Techniques for data sharing and aggregation to support data mining and visualisation

Former DPhil students include:

Douglas Creager: A graph-based approach to the automated discovery of data transformation (2007)
Mila Katzarova: Secure delegation in a distributed healthcare context (2009)
Sarah Induruwa-Fernando: Achieving interoperability between workflow management systems (2009)
Nicolas Wu: Generative templates for formal metamodel design (2010)
Mark Slaymaker: The formalisation and transformation of access control policies (2011)
Clint Sieunarine: Evolving access control: Formal models and analysis (2012)
Jaco Jacobs: A formal refinement framework for the Systems Modeling Language (2015)
Chad Heitzenrater: Software security investment modelling for decision-support (2018)
Yang Liu: Privacy-Preserving Targeted Advertising for Mobile Devices (2018)
Emma Osborn: Small-scale Cyber Security (2018)

Former research assistants include:

Carl Christensen
Ghita Kouadri Mostefaoui
Xiaoqi Ma
Lee Momtahan
Eugenia Politou
David Power
Douglas Russell
Clint Sieunarine
Mark Slaymaker
Graeme Wilson

Biography

I gained a first class honours degree in Computer Science from the University of Wales, Swansea. Later, I received an MSc and a DPhil from the University of Oxford. I am currently a University Lecturer in Software Engineering at the University of Oxford, teaching on the Software Engineering Programme (a post I have held since January 2002). Previously I was a Principal Lecturer in Computing at Oxford Brookes University; prior to that I was a research officer in the Computing Laboratory (now Department of Computer Science).