Dr Ingolf Becker

I am an Associate Professor in Security and Crime Science in the Department of Security and Crime Science at University College London. I am part of UCL's Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber-Security Research (ACE-CSR) and a Principal Investigator at the Research Institute in Socio-Technical Security (RISCS). I currently lead UCL's part of the 3-year ESPRC project Protecting public-facing professionals and their dependents online (3PO).

My research focuses on human-centred security and privacy. I fundamentally believe that security and privacy are never the primary task but should instead be seen as an enabler for productivity and society more generally. I work with people and organisations to build and study systems and policies that are both secure and productive.

News

01/10/24 I have been promoted to Associate Professor at UCL! Thank you to all the internal and external referees for supporting me.
94/09/24 Marilyne Ordekian is presenting our work (with Marie Vasek) on Investigating the Self-Regulation and Practices of Cryptocurrency Exchanges in Light of the EU's Upcoming legislations MiCA and DORA at the 115th Annual Conference of the Society of Legal Scholars in the Cyberlaw session.
12/06/24 Kris Christman and I had an abstract on our work on the 3PO project accepted for HFC 2024 in Montreal, Canada. We will both be attending, it should be an exiting event.
11/06/24 I am giving a talk at the Festival of Digital Research and Scholarship organised by UCL's Advanced Research Computing (ARC) on Automated participant recruitment for survey studies. The demo code is on GitHub.
10/06/24 I am charing a session (From Psychology to Cyber Security) at this year's Crime Science Conference. This year's theme is Fraud, Fakery, and Deception.
24/05/24 My PhD student Gerard Buckley is giving a presentation about his work on GDPR to the sasig. As journals are taking a long time reviewing some of Gerard's outputs, we have made two papers available as pre-prints: GDPR: Is it worth it? Perceptions of workers who have experienced its implementation and How might the GDPR evolve? A question of politics, pace and punishment.

Recent Publications

A complete list of my publications can be found here or on my Google Scholar Profile.

Recent Projects

Protecting public-facing professionals and their dependents online (3PO)

The 3PO is an EPSRC funded project associated with the National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online. We focus on protecting public-facing police personnel and their dependents online by co-designing vulnerability assessments, harm reporting apps, and various risk assessment tools, alongside training and supporting materials.

Kris Christman is the senior research fellow on the project at UCL.

Secure Development

Dr Charles Weir and I have been working on a project to improve software security through a bottom-up approach. We focus on helping developers understand, appropriately evaluate and promote security inside their organisations. After successfully working with almost a dozen organisations and publishing our results in conferences and journals, we successfully commercialised our project through CyberASAP in 2021. We still hold regular training events, and our workshop and materials are open source and can be used free of charge. We continue working with companies, both for research to improve the package and for consultancy to help deliver the training. We have good links with organisations specialising in training and professional development, and certification bodies to improve secure software development in the UK and abroad.

Attitudes, Barriers, and Incentives to Secure IoT

Dr Tristan Caulfield and I have been working in collaboration with colleagues from Japan's National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) on cross-cultural studies on internet service providers' and individuals' attitudes, barriers, and incentives to secure the internet of things. The first part of this work has been published, and will be presented at USENIX Security '23.

Research Supervision

I mainly supervise PhD students through UCL's CDT in Cybersecurity, the Dawes Centre for Future Crime, and UCL SECReT. If you want to study with me, please email me before submitting an application to UCL with a research proposal and a CV attached.

Finished Students

Teaching

Professional Activities

Program Committees

External Reviewing

Academic Service

Contact

Email

i.becker at ucl.ac.uk

Post

Dr Ingolf Becker
Security and Crime Science
University College London
Gower Street
London
WC1E 6BT
United Kingdom