Monthly Archives: September 2020

Hiring for the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre (Sep 2020 version)

We have yet another “post-doc” position in the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre: https://www.cambridgecybercrime.uk (for the happy reason that Ben is leaving us to become a Lecturer in Digital Methods in Edinburgh).

Hence, once again, we are looking for an enthusiastic researcher to join us to work on our datasets of cybercrime activity, collecting new types of data, maintaining existing datasets and doing innovative research using our data. The person we appoint will define their own goals and objectives and pursue them independently, or as part of a team.

We are specifically interested in determining how cybercrime has changed in response the COVID-19 pandemic and our funding requires us to identify new trends, to collect (and share) relevant data, and to rapidly provide an analysis of what is happening, with the aim of assisting in optimising technical and policy responses. We are also expanding our data collection into examining the online activities of extremist groups — with a specific focus on pandemic related issues.

An ideal candidate would identify datasets that can be collected, build the collection systems and then do cutting edge research on this data – whilst encouraging other academics to take our data and make their own contributions to the field. However, we recognise that candidates may be from a technical background and hence stronger at the collecting side, or from a social science background and hence stronger on providing compelling insights into what our data reveals. Along with a CV we expect to see a covering letter which sets out what type of research might be done and the skills which will be brought to bear, along with an indication where help would need to be sought from colleagues in our interdisciplinary environment.

Please follow this link to the advert to read the formal advertisement for the details about exactly who and what we’re looking for and how to apply — and please pay special attention to our request for a covering letter.

Job ad: Research Assistants/Associates in Compilers or Operating Systems for CHERI and the Arm Morello Board

We are pleased to announce two new research and/or software-development posts contributing to the CHERI project and Arm’s forthcoming Morello prototype processor, SoC, and development board. Learn more about CHERI and Morello on our project web site.

Fixed-term: The funds for this post are available for up to 2 years, with the possibility of extension as grant funds permit.

Research Assistant: £26,715 – £30,942 or Research Associate: £32,816 – £40,322

http://www.jobs.cam.ac.uk/job/26834/

We are seeking one or more Research Assistants (without PhD) or Research Associates (holding or shortly to obtain a PhD) with a strong background in compilers and/or operating systems to contribute to the CHERI Project and our joint work with Arm on their prototype Morello board, which incorporates CHERI into a high-end superscalar ARMv8-A processor. CHERI is a highly successful collaboration between the University of Cambridge, SRI International, and ARM Research to develop new architectural security primitives. The CHERI protection model extends off-the-shelf processor Instruction-Set Architectures (ISAs) and processors with new capability-based security primitives supporting fine-grained C/C++-language memory protection and scalable software compartmentalization.

A measurement of link rot: 57%

I submitted my PhD on the 31st August 2005 (9 months before Twitter started, almost two years before the first iPhone). The easiest version to find (click here) contains the minor revisions requested by my examiners and some typographical changes to fit it into the Computer Lab’s Technical Report series.

Since it seemed like a good idea at the time, my thesis has an annotated bibliography (so you can read a brief precis of what I referenced, which could assist you in deciding whether to follow it up). I also went to some effort to identify online versions of everything I cited, because it always helpful to just click on a link and immediately see the paper, news article or other material.

The thesis has 153 references, in two cases I provided two URLs, and in three cases I could not provide any URL — though I did note that the three ITU standards documents I cited were available from the ITU bookshop and it was possible to download a small number of standards without charge. That is, the bibliography contained 152 URLs.
Continue reading A measurement of link rot: 57%