This project will model, design, analyze, and implement a novel secure, transparent end-to-end verifiable e-voting system that can enable liquid democracy. With the advancement of digital technology, developing a secure and transparent e-voting system becomes increasingly important to the UK society. In 2015, UK Digital Democracy Commission recommends that "By 2020, secure online voting should be an option for all voters". The outcomes of this project will push forward e-voting development in both theoretical and practical aspects. It can provide valuable expertise input to the UK Parliament to accelerate UK's e-voting adoption progress. Conventionally, no voter behavioral characteristics were taken into account in the analysis of e-voting verifiability. However, the correctness of the election result when the election authorities are adversarial is impossible to verify unless the humans that participate in the protocol follow a suitable behavior. This means that the voters, beyond the ballot-casting procedure, are supposed to carry out additional steps that may find to be counterintuitive. This project will initiate the study of e-voting ceremony, which expands a security protocol with out-of-band channels, and the human users are considered as separate nodes of the system that should be taken into account when performing the security analysis. The statistical data of Estonian i-vote users collected from the legally-binding national elections and European Parliament elections will be used in our study. The state-of-the-art end-to-end verifiable e-voting systems [1,2] in the standard model can only support basic vote tally schemes due to its technical limitation - homomorphic tally. This drawback prevents those systems from wider adoption in the real world. To address this drawback, this project will construct a universally verifiable ballot mixing mechanism (i.e., mix-net) in the standard model. Its key component is a zero-knowledge shuffle proof/argument that allows the mixing server to show the correctness of its ballot shuffling operation without violating voter privacy. Following the paradigm of [1], we need a non-interactive zero-knowledge shuffle proof with perfect soundness in the common reference string model. Unfortunately, none of the existing candidates satisfy this requirement. This project will, therefore, construct such a candidate to fill the missing puzzle piece. Liquid democracy is a hybrid of direct democracy and representative democracy, where voters can either vote directly on issues, or they can delegate their votes to representatives who vote on their behalf. Due to its advantages, liquid democracy has received high attentions since the spread of its concept; however, there is no good implementation available in practice yet. The ultimate goal of this project is to fill this gap and develop the world's first provably secure candidate for digital liquid democracy. To enable vote delegation for liquid democracy, advanced blockchain technologies, such as cryptonote and zerocash, will be adopted. [1] Aggelos Kiayias, Thomas Zacharias, and Bingsheng Zhang. DEMOS-2: scalable E2E verifiable elections without random oracles. In Proceedings of CCS 2015. [2] Aggelos Kiayias, Thomas Zacharias, and Bingsheng Zhang. End-to-end verifiable elections in the standard model. In Proceedings of EUROCRYPT 2015.

A significant proportion of materials are produced in crystalline form. Many of these crystals are obtained by nucleation and growth from solution. This type of crystal production is often referred to as industrial crystallization. Crystallization is a key separation and purification unit in most of the pharmaceutical, food and fine chemical processes, with a significant impact on the efficiency and profitability of the overall process. Over 90% of all pharmaceutical products contain active ingredients produced in crystalline form and typical raw material cost for a single batch of active pharmaceutical ingredient is $1 to $2 million. Failure to meet product specifications incurs significant costs. For efficient downstream operation (such as filtration and drying) and product effectiveness (e.g. bioavailability, tablet stability) the control of crystal purity, size distribution and shape can be critically important. The crystal size and shape affect the dissolution rate, which is an important property of crystals for medicinal use. In the pharmaceutical industry, the relative impact of drug benefit versus adverse side effects can depend on the dissolution rate. Control of crystal size and shape enables the optimization of the dissolution rate to maximize the benefit while minimizing the side effects. Poor control of crystal size and shape can also result in unacceptably long filtration or drying times, or in extra processing steps, such as recrystallization or milling, and can influence the purity of the product which is especially important in the food and pharmaceutical industries, in which the crystals are consumed. Improved control of crystallization processes offer possibilities for better product quality and improved process efficiency, for example by reducing time to market (and extending the length of time before patent expiration), and the reduction of compromised batches, therefore providing significant increase in quality of life, for example by making new drugs available more quickly and at lower cost. However, controlling crystallization is challenging due its high nonlinearity and its high sensitivity to process conditions. The aim of the research is to develop a systematic and comprehensive framework for controlling pharmaceutical crystal formation that incorporates first-principles simulation models, efficient dynamic optimization and model based control algorithms, as well as novel mathematical analysis techniques. The approach will allow to control the shape of the crystal and the overall form of the size distribution by repeatedly solving a constrained nonlinear optimization problem in real-time that will adjust the operating conditions to achieve the desired targets, and guarantees that the process operates within feasible conditions. Uncertainties in the operating conditions will be incorporated in the controller design to reduce variability of the product quality from its desired value. Measurements provided by in situ process analytical technology will be used in real-time by the feedback control strategy to estimate and predict the product quality for different operating conditions. This technique will be useful in treating several industrially important key problems in crystallization, such as controlling the formation of desired polymorphs and/or achieving consistent product quality despite of uncertainties due to scale-up. The end result of the project will be a novel methodology for crystallization control, which will provide a comprehensive framework (including model, algorithm, software and equipment) for the robust design of desired polymorph, crystal shape as well as the form of the crystal size distribution for specific applications (e.g. drug delivery and dosage, or proteomics), opening the way toward systematic crystal engineering in the future.

The fellowship will examine the science, technology and application of Multi-Party Computation technology in various application domains. MPC is a long standing theoretical construct, which is only now becoming practically realisable. It has the potential to revolutionize the way we enable trust in our computing infrastructure (by distributing trust amongst different parties). It will enable greater privacy aware applications, (by enabling parties to compute on data without holding it `in the clear'), and it will ensure greater security (by providing robust and secure protocols for tasks currently performed in an insecure and ad-hoc manner). It can also enable new business models and applications by allowing parties who currently do not share data resources, to share the said resources without compromising on either privacy or security. The research programme covers a pipeline of work covering the lower TRL levels. We will conduct basic scientific research in the underlying mathematics and protocols, we will conduct research in the systems engineering needed to bring such protocols to an efficient reality, including work on programming tools and models, and finally we will examine potential applications via demonstrators and our industrial advisory board (all of whome have been selected due to their long term interaction with our group and their expertise in specific application domains of MPC).

Recent reports from the Royal Society, the government Cybersecurity strategy, as well as the National Cyber Security Center highlight the importance of cybersecurity, in ensuring a safe information society. They highlight the challenges faced by the UK in this domain, and in particular the challenges this field poses: from a need for multi-disciplinary expertise and work to address complex challenges, that span from high-level policy to detailed engineering; to the need for an integrated approach between government initiatives, private industry initiatives and wider civil society to tackle both cybercrime and nation state interference into national infrastructures, from power grids to election systems. They conclude that expertise is lacking, particularly when it comes to multi-disciplinary experts with good understanding of effective work both in government and industry. The EPSRC Doctoral Training Center in Cybersecurity addresses this challenge, and aims to train multidisciplinary experts in engineering secure IT systems, tacking and interdicting cybercrime and formulating effective public policy interventions in this domain. The training provided provides expertise in all those areas through a combination of taught modules, and training in conducting original world-class research in those fields. Graduates will be domain experts in more than one of the subfields of cybersecurity, namely Human, Organizational and Regulatory aspects; Attacks, Defences and Cybercrime; Systems security and Cryptography; Program, Software and Platform Security and Infrastructure Security. They will receive training in using techniques from computing, social sciences, crime science and public policy to find appropriate solutions to problems within those domains. Further, they will be trained in responsible research and innovation to ensure both research, but also technology transfer and policy interventions are protective of people's rights, are compatible with democratic institutions, and improve the welfare of the public. Through a program of industrial internships all doctoral students will familiarize themselves with the technologies, polices and also challenges faced by real-world organizations, large and small, trying to tackle cybersecurity challenges. Therefore they will be equipped to assume leadership positions to solve those problems upon graduation.

Within the next few years the number of devices connected to each other and the Internet will outnumber humans by almost 5:1. These connected devices will underpin everything from healthcare to transport to energy and manufacturing. At the same time, this growth is not just in the number or variety of devices, but also in the ways they communicate and share information with each other, building hyper-connected cyber-physical infrastructures that span most aspects of people's lives. For the UK to maximise the socio-economic benefits from this revolutionary change we need to address the myriad trust, identity, privacy and security issues raised by such large, interconnected infrastructures. Solutions to many of these issues have previously only been developed and tested on systems orders of magnitude less complex in the hope they would 'scale up'. However, the rapid development and implementation of hyper-connected infrastructures means that we need to address these challenges at scale since the issues and the complexity only become apparent when all the different elements are in place. There is already a shortage of highly skilled people to tackle these challenges in today's systems with latest estimates noting a shortfall of 1.8M by 2022. With an estimated 80Bn malicious scans and 780K records lost daily due to security and privacy breaches, there is an urgent need for future leaders capable of developing innovative solutions that will keep society one step ahead of malicious actors intent on compromising security, privacy and identity and hence eroding trust in infrastructures. The Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) 'Trust, Identity, Privacy and Security - at scale' (TIPS-at-Scale) will tackle this by training a new generation of interdisciplinary research leaders. We will do this by educating PhD students in both the technical skills needed to study and analyse TIPS-at-scale, while simultaneously studying how to understand the challenges as fundamentally human too. The training involves close involvement with industry and practitioners who have played a key role in co-creating the programme and, uniquely, responsible innovation. The implementation of the training is novel due to its 'at scale' focus on TIPS that contextualises students' learning using relevant real-world, global problems revealed through project work, external speakers, industry/international internships/placements and masterclasses. The CDT will enrol ten students per year for a 4-year programme. The first year will involve a series of taught modules on the technical and human aspects of TIPS-at-scale. There will also be an introductory Induction Residential Week, and regular masterclasses by leading academics and industry figures, including delivery at industrial facilities. The students will also undertake placements in industry and research groups to gain hands-on understanding of TIPS-at-scale research problems. They will then continue working with stakeholders in industry, academia and government to develop a research proposal for their final three years, as well as undertake internships each year in industry and international research centres. Their interdisciplinary knowledge will continue to expand through masterclasses and they will develop a deep appreciation of real-world TIPS-at-scale issues through experimentation on state-of-the-art testbed facilities and labs at the universities of Bristol and Bath, industry and a city-wide testbed: Bristol-is-Open. Students will also work with innovation centres in Bath and Bristol to develop novel, interdisciplinary solutions to challenging TIPS-at-scale problems as part of Responsible Innovation Challenges. These and other mechanisms will ensure that TIPS-at-Scale graduates will lead the way in tackling the trust, identity, privacy and security challenges in future large, massively connected infrastructures and will do so in a way that considers wider sosocial responsibility.