Simon Parkin

Senior Research and Teaching Fellow

Office: 6.07, Malet Place Engineering

Tel: +44 020 7679 0352

Fax: +44 020 7387 1397

Email: s.parkin [at] cs.ucl.ac.uk

Simon Parkin is a Senior Research & Teaching Fellow in the Human-Centred Security team, part of the Information Security Research Group at UCL. Following completion of his PhD at Newcastle University in 2007, he was a Research Associate on the inter-disciplinary Trust Economics project through to 2011, then a member of the Innovation Team at HP Enterprise Security Services until mid-2012 before joining UCL. Research interests are focused on support for personal security decisions and behaviours.

Research

Home user security behaviours and perceptions

Recent work: “In Control with no Control: Perceptions and Reality of Windows 10 Home Edition Update Features” (USEC 2019)
Policy engagement: acknowledgement on UK Parliament POSTNote POST-PN-0593, “Cyber Security of Consumer Devices” (2019)

Cyber security behaviours in organisations

Recent work: "You've left me no choices: security economics to inform behaviour intervention support in organizations", STAST 2019 [*Awarded Best Paper*]
Identifying ‘Shadow Security’ behaviours, a part of the Productive Security project (2012-2016)
Industry whitepaper: “Awareness is only the first step” (with HP Enterprise, 2016)
Policy engagement: ‘Shadow Security’ articles and whitepaper referred to throughout the NCSC ‘You Shape Security’ collection

Cyber security at board level

Cyber Readiness for Boards (CRfB) project - see Projects panel

Implications of consumer Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in tech-abuse

"Identifying Unintended Harms of Cybersecurity Countermeasures", eCrime 2019 [*Awarded Best Paper*]
"Usability Analysis of Shared Device Ecosystem Security: Informing Support for Survivors of IoT-Facilitated Tech-Abuse", NSPW 2019
Overview Policy Leaflet
Recent work: “‘Internet of Things’: How Abuse is Getting Smarter” (Safe Magazine), available at SSRN
Policy engagement: acknowledgement on UK Parliament POSTNote POST-PN-0592, “Stalking and Harassment” (2018)

Management of security in charities

Active member of the UK Charities Against Fraud (CAF) steering committee (see https://www.gov.uk/guidance/protect-your-charity-from-fraud for further details), and co-chair of the Cyber Fraud Resilience sub-committee.

Research practice in security

Includes user studies in security and privacy (“Towards robust experimental design for user studies in security and privacy”, LASER 2016), member of the UCL Computer Science Ethics Committee (CSEC), and academic member of the UCL Research Ethics Committee (REC). Member of the Research Institute in Science of Cyber Security (RISCS) community.

Teaching

People and Security (COMP0056)

People and Security also taught at Oxford University as part of the Software Engineering Programme

Security (2nd year Undergraduate, COMP0141) - co-taught with Marie Vasek in 2020 / Sarah Meiklejohn in 2019

Information Security Dissertation (COMP0064) - supervising dissertations in the area of human-centred security

Example projects published as papers include "Of two minds about two-factor: understanding everyday FIDO U2F usability through device comparison and experience sampling" (SOUPS 2019) and “Metaphors considered harmful? An exploratory study of the effectiveness of functional metaphors for end-to-end encryption” (USEC 2018)

(Previously) (3rd-year Research Group Projects) (2013-2017) - supervising group projects in the area of human-centred security

Example project published as a paper, “The Security Blanket of the Chat World: An Analytic Evaluation and a User Study of Telegram”

Program Committee service

New Security Paradigms Workshop (NSPW) (2020)

SOUPS poster jury (2020)

Workshop on Usable Security and Privacy (USEC - 2016, 2018, 2019)

European Workshop on Usable Security (EuroUSEC - 2018-present)

Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects of Security and Trust (STAST - 2016-present)

(previously) SecOnt

Reviewed variously including CHI, WEIS, IEEE Security & Privacy, Information Technology & People, Journal of Cybersecurity, WIREs Forensic Science, The Computer Journal

Publications

See my Google Scholar page, scholar.google.co.uk/citations

This page was last modified on 07 Feb 2020.

Projects

Cyber Readiness for Boards (CRfB) (Co-Investigator) (2019-present)
Gender and IoT (Co-PI) (2018-present)
Investigating Data Security Practices for Small Charities (PI, UCL Knowledge Exchange & Innovation) (2018-2019)