Jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) - part of UKRI, Toshiba Europe Ltd alongside other industry partners & GCHQ, with the University of Bristol through 2019 Prosperity Partnership awards, will focus on the creation of Secure Wireless Agile Networks (SWAN) that are resilient to both cyber-attacks and accidental or induced failures.

Wireless access is essential to the networks that underpin modern life, but many networks which rely on radio frequency (RF) interfaces are especially vulnerable to cyber-attacks or other failures.

In a five-year joint research programme, the partnership will identify vulnerabilities in the RF interfaces so techniques can be developed to detect and mitigate against the effects of cyber-attacks.

Increasingly, networks are becoming software defined, making them highly flexible and independent of their transmission and computing substrate, and enabling security updates to be easily rolled out. But this is not true for the radio interface: current systems are inflexible and cannot easily adapt to new standards and spectrum.

SWAN aims to create the enabling technology for radios that can truly be software defined and secure by design down to the basic levels of system functionality such as operating frequency bands, modulation, and multiple-access protocols, as well as the surrounding frameworks needed to make resilient and secure systems. In doing so, the team will develop radios whose RF characteristics can be updated to deal with new threats, and the technology to enable efficient and safe re-configuration in the field. 

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