David Chadwick - Facilities and Strengths

Now that all the journals are online, I never actually go to the library, physically, because I get all my resources online. So we've subscribed to all the main computing journals. And so from my desktop I can access all the ACM and IEEE and Lecture Notes in Computer Science, and I can download the papers, without having to go to the library and get them. So that's very important, I think, to have access to all the latest research papers, on your desktop, on your PC.

We've got a good research base. We've got a lot of active researchers. We came out highly in the RAE, which was four years ago, and we're now preparing for the next Research Assessment Exercise. And that feeds into the teaching. A lot of my research, I feed it into the course that I'm teaching, so that students understand the latest state of the art, and how it's evolving, and what they're going to be coming across in their working lives in the next five years, maybe.

I mean, one of the interesting things from a security perspective is a thing called Advanced Persistent Threats, which are a new threat which were discovered during 2012 through Stuxnet, which took down the Iranian centrifuges, but also Flame, where people, when they get that infested on their computer, it monitors their Skype conversations, it keylogs, takes their passwords. It connects Bluetooth to their mobile phone and logs what's happening there, and downloads their address book. These Advanced Persistent Threats are really quite a serious challenge to security. And they're now starting to be used by criminals, to attack bank accounts and online banking.

So we've got real challenges in the security domain, and it's an ongoing process because you develop security mechanisms, and the attackers find a way around it, and you have to open new mechanisms. It's a continually escalating war, really. And ultimately, there's no winners, because you can never make a system 100 percent secure; it's just too costly. It's too difficult. There's always going to be weaknesses, so you always have to be just trying to patch one weakness, look for the next threat, fix that one. It's a never-ending arms race.