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= Professor Vijay Varadharajan =

A renowned cyber security authority, Professor Vijay Varadharajan works with government, industry and research peers to thwart pervasive digital threats lurking within our online systems. Prof Vijay Varadharajan has held the Global Innovation Chair in Cyber Security at the University of Newcastle since March 2017. He is also the Director of Advanced Cyber Security Engineering Research Centre (ACSRC ) at Newcastle. Previously he was Microsoft Chair Professor in Innovation in Computing at Macquarie University (2001-2017). At Macquarie, he conceived the concept of an interdisciplinary institute in Cyber Security and was the founder of the Optus MQ Cyber Security Hub. Prior to this he was Dean of School of Computing and IT at University of Western Sydney (1996-2000).

Philosophy
Technology has become hardwired into our modern lives. From tracking our health and finances, running our cars and allowing us to travel and communicate. Technology can even manage our household appliances while we’re at work. But how trustworthy is technology?

“For example, is the technology doing what it is supposed to do? How can we trust technology and the decisions made by technology? How can we develop technologies that are secure, that we can trust to keep our information private?

Vijay, believes the key role of a technologist is essentially about providing information and services at the right time, at the right place and that are trustworthy and dependable and that adds value to the users, which enhances the quality of their lives.

Industry and Community Impact

 * Software Defined Networks (SDN) Security: Our work on policy-based security architecture for Software-Defined Networks was selected by the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s as Top 25 downloaded articles in 2018-2019 in the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security on IEEE Xplore®.
 * Founded Optus-Macquarie Cyber Security Hub (Sept 2014 – June 2016): Conceived and founded the Cyber Security Institute/Hub at MQ – Sept 2014. Worked to bring together aspects of Cyber Security from Computing and Information Technology (Faculty of Science and Engineering), Business Risk Management (Faculty of Business and Economics) and Policing and Counterterrorism (Faculty of Arts) – May 2015 to Nov 2015. Obtained the support of Senior Execs at Singtel/Optus in Cyber Security Strategy Nov 2014 – Feb 2015. Presentation to University Executive of the Cyber Security Hub initiative and obtained their support - Nov 2015. Worked to establish the Cyber Security Hub – 27 May 2016 (with $5M from Optus and an equal amount from Macquarie University)
 * Cloud Data Security: The work on Role Based Encryption (RBE) enabling policy driven access to encrypted electronic health patient records in the cloud received the Runner Up EUREKA Prize for Outstanding Science in Safeguarding Australia in 2013. The RBE theoretical framework also obtained the prestigious Wilkes Award 2011 from The Computer Journal, UK (named after Sir Maurice Wilkes, Cambridge University).
 * TrustLite Architecture: Our work on the design of lightweight trusted security architecture, TrustLite, was patented by Intel Corporation and being used in their low-cost embedded system products (2010-2014).
 * Trust Enhanced Security Paradigm: Coined the notion of “trust enhanced security" referring using trust model to enhance the quality of secure decision making, such as an authorization decision or a routing decision. In particular, the trust model captured both hard trust characteristics (such as certificates and credentials) and soft trust characteristics (such as reputation and social trust parameters). Our work demonstrated how such a hybrid trust model can improve the security evaluation decisions in different contexts such as mobile agents (at the application level), mobile network ad hoc routing (at the network level), and computing platforms (at the system level). This new paradigm and its applications formed the basis for several keynotes in international conferences and industry forums during 2005-2010.
 * Web Services Authorization Architecture: The work on authorization for service-oriented architectures led to the development of web services authorization architecture (WSAA) layer on top of the web services security layer. The WSAA layer provided the flexibility for supporting multiple types of authorization policies and mechanisms. WSAA was integrated with Microsoft's .NET environment and was used to demonstrate a comprehensive solution to securing electronic patient records in a distributed system (2003-2006). The technologies providing conditional and joint authorization were transferred to Microsoft ACL Manager Product Group. Was awarded Microsoft Trustworthy Computing Award for this work (2006).

Experience and Expertise
For Vijay's technical research work in a range of these areas in security for more than 35 years, please see his Personal Technical Distinctions webpage.