Understanding the Adversary’s Mindset: Building Robust Defenses and Resilient Systems
The Security, Privacy and Trust Research Laboratory (SPT@CUT) is a research group at the Cyprus University of Technology, and is part of the Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering.
The lab was founded by Dr. Panagiotis Ilia with the purpose of advancing research in the broader area of security and privacy, particularly across complex and interconnected systems shaped by modern and emerging technologies. The research conducted at SPT aims to enable stronger protections, develop secure systems, and design resilient infrastructures.
More broadly, our work is grounded in the belief that “to be in a position to defend effectively, one must first understand the mindset of the adversary.” At SPT, we identify real-world security and privacy threats, study how systems are attacked and exploited, and use those insights to design resilient and practical defenses.
“In security research, the ability to defend effectively is inevitably linked to the ability to think like an adversary. To meaningfully protect systems, we must first step into the attacker’s shoes — to understand how they think, how they act, and how systems fail.”
Our Goals
- Conduct high-impact research in security and privacy, with a strong emphasis on real-world systems and infrastructures.
- Develop a deep understanding of the threat landscape, attacker behaviours and strategies, and the methods used to compromise systems.
- Design and develop robust, practical, and usable defense mechanisms and system hardening techniques and methodologies, and evaluate their effectiveness and impact.
- Emphasize and promote secure-by-design, privacy-aware, and ethically responsible system development as core principles for building trustworthy and resilient computing and web infrastructures, and intelligent systems.
- Support both undergraduate and postgraduate (MSc and PhD) student research in the lab’s areas of expertise, and contribute to the academic and professional development of future researchers in cybersecurity and privacy.
- Collaborate with academic and industry partners to transform research outcomes into applied knowledge, shared technical expertise, and solutions that address contemporary and emerging challenges.
- Attract national and European research funding to advance long-term scientific progress and innovation across the lab’s domains of expertise.
Research Areas
The laboratory’s research activities span a wide range of research areas, including:
- Web and Mobile Security
- Network Security
- Authentication and Access Control
- Online Services and Social Networks
- Internet Privacy and PETs
- Threat Modelling and Risk Analysis
- Adversarial Behavior Analysis
- Anomaly Detection Techniques
- Static and Dynamic Analysis
- Vulnerability Discovery and Exploitation
- Fuzzing and Penetration Testing
- Large-Scale Security Measurements
- PKI Infrastructure and Certificates
- Adversarial Machine Learning
- Security of Intelligent Systems