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Challenge-led research producing commercialisation, patents, disclosed vulnerabilities and advice that has shaped payment, transport and telecommunications practice.
Funded research
Projects led or co-led by me, funded by the European Commission, EPSRC and Innovate UK, alongside work sponsored directly by the centre’s industrial partners.
A fourteen-partner consortium developing tools that let law enforcement agencies extract evidence from encrypted mobile devices, combining software methods, hardware attacks, and the ethical and legal frameworks that must govern their use. The project produced the first comprehensive analysis of physical fault injection and side-channel attacks on mobile devices.
Designing a quantum-resistant Trusted Platform Module: post-quantum algorithms suitable for inclusion in a TPM, across hardware, software and virtualised environments, with use cases in online banking, activity tracking and device management.
Technology for personalised rail travel that still respects privacy requirements, including the Consumer-Oriented Data Provenance framework.
Robust, secure, high-bandwidth wireless communication for intra-aircraft avionics data networks, with GE Aviation Systems and other industrial partners. The work produced several publications, one of which won the best paper award in the security session of a major avionics conference.
Two EU Framework Programme 7 projects on the security of portable cryptographic tokens.
Commercialisation
Through TASC, I create opportunities for talented undergraduate and MSc students to become active contributors to research commercialisation—as co-founders, co-inventors, investor-facing team members and paid developers. This approach has supported three ventures through the Innovate UK CyberASAP programme, each progressing to the funded minimum viable product stage. My wider work in developing students through research, innovation and commercialisation was recognised with Royal Holloway’s Outstanding Mentoring / Developing Others Award at the 2025 Festival of Research. If you are interested to discuss our current ideas/projects and how to get involved or alternatively discuss your own ideas please do get in touch. Also check the Commercialisation section of the TASC website.
Trusted execution environments applied to confidential data exchange. The project reached the finals of the 2021 CyberASAP competition and received funding to develop a minimum viable product; we hired four Royal Holloway undergraduate developers to build it. A patent application covering the unique selling point of TensorCrypt was submitted with support from Royal Holloway Research and Innovation.
A deep-tech spin-out making machine learning and deep learning algorithms explainable, auditable and transparent. Seclea was additionally supported by the ICURe programme and went on to raise funding from external investors and Innovate UK. It now operates as an independent company led by Dr Raja Naeem Akram, a former member of the centre.
Predictive threat detection built on causality chains. A finalist in the third CyberASAP round, funded to build a minimum viable product and completed in February 2020. Royal Holloway subsequently invested in business analysis and a commercial-grade implementation to provide a stepping stone for commercialising the underlying patent.
Patents
Securely sharing data. With Dr Carlton Shepherd, a patent application for a method and system for securely sharing data, arising from our 2021 CyberASAP participation. Royal Holloway has invested in further business analysis around its commercialisation.
Recording events and their impact on data. With Dr Raja Naeem Akram and James Tapsell, a worldwide patent application for a technique to record an event and its impact on data across the lifetime of that data, specific to the individual entities represented in it. The implementation helps serve GDPR rights: the right of access, the right to be forgotten, and the right to rectification with evidence.
MSc projects I have supervised have won best MSc project awards and Royal Holloway David Lindsay Prizes on multiple occasions. Several have resulted in conference publications, with best paper and best session awards.
Responsible disclosure
Work from my group, and from projects I have supervised, has identified and responsibly disclosed vulnerabilities in products already in service.
With Dr Carlton Shepherd, a vulnerability in the Android OS affecting all known versions across all manufacturers. Responsibly disclosed and formally acknowledged, and disseminated to our Horizon 2020 EXFILES project partners.
An MSc project I co-supervised built a framework able to emulate random firmware devices. It identified seven memory corruption exploits, two of them zero-day vulnerabilities.
An MSc supervisee discovered a previously unknown buffer overflow in a specific DVR. The vulnerability was assigned a CVSS score of 10.0, the highest a vulnerability can score.
Advisory
I led a sequence of Information Security Group expert studies on payment authentication for the trade body of the UK card payments industry.
With colleagues from the centre, a counter-expertise analysis of a report into the Dutch OV-Chipkaart transport system, responding to newly published attacks on MIFARE Classic cards. The team went on to further work on MIFARE and chip migration planning for the Dutch transport system.
A member of the expert ISG team on a public transport consultancy project presented at high office level, quantifying the security problems and formally reviewing the plans for migration to new technologies.
I co-authored an evaluation of where security controllers should live in mobile devices. The document was forwarded to ETSI and distributed among the major telecommunications operators.
If you are interested in discussing consultancy opportunities, please contact me at k[dot]markantonakis[at]rhul[dot]ac[dot]uk
Esteem
A selection of invited keynote presentations delivered at international conferences.
I regularly contribute invited lectures and specialist teaching on embedded, cyber-physical and trusted-system security at universities, international programmes and summer schools in the UK and overseas.
I have chaired and served on the programme committees of numerous international conferences and workshops in information security, and regularly review for leading journals in the field.
I serve on Royal Holloway’s Academic Staffing and Titles Committee (ASTC), contributing to the University’s academic promotion process.
At national level, I serve on the EPSRC Resilience and Security Strategic Advisory Team, contributing to the development of national research priorities.
I also contribute to national and international research leadership as a REF 2029 Expert Panel member for Computer Science and Informatics.
I also ran the centre’s annual open day from 2004 to 2019.