A Swinburne University of Technology cyber security project that aims to enable full lifecycle privacy protection on the cloud has been funded by a $450,000 Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Project grant.
Deputy director of Swinburne’s Data Science Research Institute, Professor JinJun Chen, who leads the project, said that privacy protection for user data hosted in cloud environments is at risk throughout all stages of the user information lifecycle.
“Current approaches mainly focus on a specific case at a certain stage. This project aims to investigate those challenges systematically and establish innovative solutions to enable full lifecycle privacy protection on the cloud,” Chen said.
The federal government has recently released a discussion paper on cybersecurity, Australia’s 2020 Cyber Security Strategy: A call for views, which states that $2.3 billion was stolen by cyber criminals from Australian consumers in 2017, while there were 53,474 reports of cybercrime in the 2017-18 financial year and another 64,528 in 2018-19.
More than 960 data breach notifications were also made from April 2018 to March 2019, 60 per cent of which were malicious or criminal attacks.
“Current data auditing approaches for verifying data integrity lack sufficient efficiency and security, and hence cannot provide timely warning for removing potential data loss threats,” Chen said.
“Our project aims to lead to timely warning and significantly reduce or avoid data loss incidents. In turn, this will bring significant economic, commercial and social benefits to the Australian community.”