PhD with a University and Industry

I commenced my PhD through The University of Melbourne in March this year. In July this year, my industry agreements came through and I am officially the first PhD student to be sponsored by CA Labs. The reason it took so long was because I was the first and there were lots of legal issues, like IP to sort through. The general agreement is that the work I do is still owned by the university, but CA have non-restricted rights to everything I do as well.

My current research aims to incorporate data mining for role based access control (RBAC). My supervisor is strong in his data mining knowledge and an expert in this field. Industry have some practical problems they hope to solve with data mining in the area of role extraction for RBAC. I have spent my first 4 months reading about general RBAC issues and have discovered the name of what I am trying to do is called Role Engineering.

My previous research was related to coordinated scan detection algorithms. I completed my honours last year in this area. I evaluated some existing scan detection algorithms and extended one anomaly detection algorithm to consider coordinated scans. The move to data mining for RBAC isn't a great jump. Previous I was working with data mining for network security, now I'm looking at data mining for enterprise security.