Cybersecurity PhD Graduation – Dr Dylan Smyth

Dr Dylan Smyth, whose supervisors included members of Cyber Skills leadership and Executive team, Dr Donna O’Shea, Dr Sean McSweeney and Dr Victor Cionca, graduated with a Doctorate in Philosophy (by research) at MTU annual conferring’s.

The title of his PhD thesis was Enhancing the Security of Software-Defined Networks Through Offensive and Defensive Techniques. As part of his work Dylan uncovered several new security vulnerabilities in software-defined networking, a network technology used data centres and critical communication infrastructure around the world. His work involved developing new attacks to demonstrate the severity of the vulnerabilities that he found, and developing new defence techniques to mitigate these vulnerabilities, making software-defined networking, and the networks that rely on it, safer from cyber criminals