Dr. Lee Speakman
School of Science, Engineering and Environment
Biography
Lee Speakman has been involved in the area of Electronic Warfare, Networks, and Cyber Security since 2000, working in Defence Intelligence, in the UK.
After gaining a PhD in Japan in 2009 in the area of MANETs, Lee returned to defence. He worked on practical realisation of MANETs and distributed networks, and then soon moved into the area of Exploitation - involving software exploitation and security, covert networks, reverse engineering and malware analysis, CNA and CNE, and anti-forensics, amongst other areas. He worked as technical/research lead during this time across a broad range of exploitation and security-related areas.
Lee joined academia in 2015, as Senior Lecturer and leader of the Cyber Team, and programme leader for the BSc Cybersecurity, at the University of Chester. There he led the development of the MSc Cybersecurity course for delivery from 2016, which has been enormously successful. He then joined the University of Salford in early 2021.
Areas of research
Software Exploitation and Software and System Security., Secure networks, including security in SDNs, clouds, distributed networks, and ICN / NDN.
Areas of supervision
Software Exploitation and Software and System Security., Secure networks, including security in SDNs, clouds, distributed networks, and ICN / NDN., Host and Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention., Forensics and Anti-Forensics.
I have developed and taught course is Software Exploitation and Security, Network Penetration Testing, Secure Programming / Advanced Programming for Cybersecurity, Digital Forensics and Incident Response, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
My research interests in general encompasses computer science, networks, and cybersecurity. Particularly, I am interested in software protection methods in both general and specialised systems, including CFI (Control Flow Integrity) and holistic approaches – involving integrated techniques and defence in depth, separation of concerns, isolation, and so forth. I am particularly interested in novel uses of the hypervisor and supervisor modes, effectively taking a clean-slate approach to software, and a variety of other security-by-design approaches.
Furthermore, I have interests in Quantum Computation and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.
- M.Phys, Physics with Theoretical Physics, University of Manchester, UK.
- PhD, Mobile Ad hoc Networks, University of Niigata, Japan.
- PGCert, Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, Chester.
- FHEA (Fellow of the Higher Education Academy)