Research Lines

The research interest of NESG is focused on cybersecurity, our efforts being aimed at providing and improving security in networks, systems and services, either for wired, wireless and mobile environments. The principal areas where we develop our work are as follows, each of them composed of several specific relevant topics:

• Data processing and networkmetrics

  The networkmetrics research line seeks to take advantage of multivariate analysis and machine learning tools to tackle problems in communication networks, with cybersecurity as main example. An effective detection of cybersecurity incidents requires the combination of several and disparate data sources. This makes cybersec a typical Big Data problem, where the challenge is to handle tons of information from heterogeneous sources at a fastpace. In NESG, we develop new analysis methods to handle Multivariate Big Data, which are also of value in applications like IoT monitoring or Industry 4.0, and in other domains, like chemometrics, bioinformatics and personalized medicine.

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• Intrusion detection and protection

  Systems and users are very vulnerable to attacks of different typology and impact: virus, trojans, ransomware, spyware, data leakage, etc. This way, a principal topic addressed by NESG is that of protecting network environments by means of two subsequent procedures: detection of malicious behaviors, and adoption of countermeasures.

  For that, specific research lines are:

  • - Behavior modeling and classification (multivariate, HMM, clustering, SVM, GA, ...)
  • - Anomaly detection
  • - Malware detection and classification
  • - Countermeasures and response mechanisms

   

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• Ethical hacking and digital forensics

  Ethical hacking and digital forensics constitute well-known topics aimed at testing and recovering systems and services. Some specific aspects addressed by NESG in this area are:

  • - Development of new methodologies
  • - Techniques for fingerprinting
  • - Exploitation techniques and their countermeasures
  • - Ethical Hacking capabilities training
  • - Malware analysis and reverse engineering
  • - Privacy mechanisms
  • - Tools and methodologies for digital forensics

   

  NESG leads the HACKIIT team participating in CTF competitions.

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• Cyberlaw

  Cyberlaw is a very extensive field of research that, within the NESG group, focuses on the analysis of International and European regulations and their application in domestic law. The methodological approach is interdisciplinary. The objective is to analyze the state of the regulations, their scope and nature and the problems posed by their application with the purpose of proposing new norms or reforms of existing ones when they are not sufficiently effective. The main areas of study are security of network and information systems, cybersecurity, data protection and Internet governance.

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