About the project
The project investigates how distributed sensing systems can remain trustworthy and operational when facing intelligent, coordinated adversaries. It develops an AI-driven trust scoring framework to detect compromised and colluding sensors, enhancing resilience, accuracy, and decision-making in critical defence sensing applications.
This project, a collaboration between the University of Southampton and Thales UK, explores how future defence and security sensing systems can remain reliable in the presence of faults, manipulation, and intelligent adversaries. Modern sensing systems increasingly rely on large, distributed networks combining physical sensors, cyber data, and open-source intelligence, making them vulnerable to degradation, spoofing, misinformation, and coordinated attacks.
The research will develop an AI-driven trust scoring framework that continuously evaluates the reliability of individual sensors and identifies groups of sensors that may be colluding to influence system decisions. By combining anomaly detection, adversarial modelling, and data provenance analysis, the framework will assess sensor behaviour in real time and adapt to changing threat conditions.
The project will also investigate the use of game-theoretic techniques to anticipate and respond to evolving adversarial strategies. The proposed methods will be evaluated under realistic attack scenarios, including sensor tampering, spoofing, misinformation, and coordinated coalition attacks.
The outcome will be a scalable decision-support framework that improves the resilience, accuracy, and trustworthiness of distributed sensing systems, with applications in critical defence and security environments.
The successful candidate will have the exciting opportunity to undertake a three-month industrial placement with Thales UK cortAIx Labs based at their Research, Technology and Solution Innovation centre in Reading, gaining hands-on experience and exposure to real-world defence and security challenges.
The School of Electronics & Computer Science is committed to promoting equality, diversity inclusivity as demonstrated by our Athena SWAN award. We welcome all applicants regardless of their gender, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation or age, and will give full consideration to applicants seeking flexible working patterns and those who have taken a career break. The University has a generous maternity policy, onsite childcare facilities, and offers a range of benefits to help ensure employees’ well-being and work-life balance. The University of Southampton is committed to sustainability and has been awarded the Platinum EcoAward.
