Bill Buchanan (computer scientist)

William (Bill) Buchanan OBE
Born	6 March 1961 Falkirk
Nationality	British
Other names	Bill Buchanan
Education	PhD, Edinburgh Napier University, 1996
Occupation	Professor
Employer	Edinburgh Napier University
Known for	Cryptography Computer Security Computer Forensics Cloud Computing
Children	3
Awards	Officer of the Order of the British Empire
Honours	OBE
Website	asecuritysite.com

External videos
"PROF BILL BUCHANAN OBE - BUILDING A NEW WORLD - Inspired Edinburgh", Interview with Bill Buchanan
"IISP 2018: Futurist academic research into AI", Keynote talk by Bill Buchanan
"BBC News Interview - 21 August 2018", BBC Interview by Bill Buchanan
"Sky News Interview on Wannacry", Sky News Interview with Bill Buchanan
"ABC Interview on Wannacry", ABC Interview with Bill Buchanan, 13 May 2017

William Johnston Buchanan OBE FBCS CEng PFHEA (born 6 March 1961) is a Scottish computer scientist. Buchanan is a professor in the School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment. He currently leads the Blockpass ID Lab and the Centre for Cybersecurity, IoT and Cyberphysical at Edinburgh Napier University. In 2017, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to cyber security.

Buchanan has never hid his love of his home city of Edinburgh, and in April 2018, he presented alongside Richard Demarco in an event entitled, "Building a World-leading City in Arts & Science" and which discussed and debated the future of Edinburgh.

In August 2017, Buchanan was interviewed by Elliot Reeves within the "Inspired Edinburgh" series of talks with famous Edinburgh citizens. Within the talk he outlined the career route that he took in his early life and in following his father and grandfather into electrical engineering, and how he fell in love with the city the first moment he saw it. In January 2018, Buchanan decided to receive his OBE in his home city, and received this from Queen Elizabeth II at Hollyrood Palace in July 2018.

Along with the love of the City of Edinburgh, Buchanan has deep passion for cryptography and innovation and is quoted with a tagline of, "A Serial Innovator. An Old World Breaker. A New World Creator.”

Early life and career

Buchanan was born in Falkirk, Scotland in 1961. He attended Victoria Park Primary School in Falkirk and then attended Graeme High School. On leaving school - from 1977 to 1981 - he was an Apprentice Electrician at the ICI Ltd in Grangemouth. He spent 1977 to 1978 at Falkirk Technical College studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Between 1981 and 1986, Buchanan studied for a BEng (Hons) in Communication and Electronic Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University. During this time, he undertook work placements with Racal-MESL and the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. Then, in 1986, he took up a post of a Lecturer and initially taught electronics, before moving onto computer engineering, data communications and networking.

Buchanan gained his PhD in 1996 with a thesis entitled, "Analysis of electromagnetic wave propogation using 3D finite-difference time-domain methods with parallel processing". The work implemented 3D Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) methods to simulate structures in the time-domain using a direct form of Maxwell’s curl equations.

Research and Innovation

Buchanan's current research work focuses on areas of applied cryptography, blockchain, cybersecurity, citizen focused health care and digital identity. He is included in the World's Top 2% Scientists list for 2022, and ranks in the Top 40 most cited research authors in Applied Cryptography. Buchanan's leadership in research has led to a number of successful spin-out companies from Edinburgh Napier University.

On 6 May 2015 he launched The Cyber Academy at the Merchiston Campus of Edinburgh Napier University. He received the Principal's Award for contribution to Knowledge Exchange/Research in 2016 (Innovation of the Year and also Best Contribution to Information Society research theme) and in 2017 (Innovation of the year in Knowledge Exchange). Buchanan's research areas has recently focused on cryptography, cybersecurity and digital identity.

Patents

Buchanan has co-authored a number of patents including:

• Buchanan, William Johnston; Graves, Jamie Robert & Bose, Niladri, "Improvements in or relating to digital forensics", published 2019-05-08, assigned to Fortinet Inc.
• Buchanan, William Johnston; Graves, Jamie Robert & Bose, Niladri, "Digital forensics", issued 2014-11-11.
• Lanc, David; Fan, Lu & Mackinnon, Lachlan et al., "Resilient secret sharing cloud based architecture for data vault", published 2021-04-13, assigned to Leading Software Ltd.
• Stevenson, Ian; Bruce, Ramsay & Buchanan, William Johnston et al., "System and method for management of confidential data", published 2018-10-11, assigned to Edinburgh Napier University.
• Stevenson, Ian; Bruce, Ramsay & Buchanan, William Johnston et al., "Method for identification of digital content", published 2021-06-30, assigned to Cyan Forensics Ltd.
• Uthmani, Omair; Buchanan, William & Lawson, Alistair et al., "Information sharing", published 2015-05-26, assigned to The Court of Edinburgh Napier University.
• Buchanan, William Johnston; Lo, Owen Chin Wai & Penrose, Philip et al., "Method for reducing false-positives for identification of digital content", issued 2018-10-11.
• Buchanan, Bill; Mclaren, Peter & Gordon, Russell et al., "Detection of ransomware", issued 2022-09-22

Blockpass ID Lab

Buchanan leads the Blockpass ID Lab (BIL) and which was initially co-funded by Blockpass IDN and Edinburgh Napier University. It is located on the Merchiston Campus and was launched on 26 September 2018. Overall, it was the first research lab in the World to focus on digital identity, and hosts research work in areas on blockchain, digital identity, privacy preserving methods and applied cryptography, with key focus areas of around citizen focused data sharing. The lab has also hosted a number of related research grants, including GLASS and TRUSTEE, along with incubating the True Deploy future spin-out. BIL has generated a wide range of research outputs over the years, including:

• Ali, H., Ahmad, J., Jaroucheh, Z., Papadopoulos, P., Pitropakis, N., Lo, O., ... & Buchanan, W. J. (2022). Trusted Threat Intelligence Sharing in Practice and Performance Benchmarking through the Hyperledger Fabric Platform. Entropy, 24(10), 1379.
• Abubakar, M., McCarron, P., Jaroucheh, Z., Al Dubai, A., & Buchanan, B. (2021, December). Blockchain-based Platform for Secure Sharing and Validation of Vaccination Certificates. In 2021 14th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (SIN) (Vol. 1, pp. 1–8). IEEE.
• Barati, M., Buchanan, W. J., Lo, O., & Rana, O. (2021, December). A privacy-preserving distributed platform for COVID-19 vaccine passports. In Proceedings of the 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing Companion (pp. 1–6).
• Papadopoulos, P., Pitropakis, N., Buchanan, W. J., Lo, O., & Katsikas, S. (2020). Privacy-preserving passive dns. Computers, 9(3), 64.
• Jaroucheh, Z., Alissa, M., Buchanan, W. J., & Liu, X. (2020, July). TRUSTD: Combat fake content using blockchain and collective signature technologies. In 2020 IEEE 44th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC) (pp. 1235–1240). IEEE.

Research Impact Case Studies

In Unit of Assessment 11 (Computer Science and Infomatics) within REF 2021, Buchanan led two research impact case studies: "Enabling Sensitive Personal Data to be Shared with Trust using Novel Digital Security Methods", and "Protecting Employees, Children and Sensitive Data using Innovative Approaches to Cyber Security". Both of these impact case studies were graded as 4* (quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour).

COVID-19 privacy-aware contact tracing

In April 2020, Chaloner Chute at the DHI defined a research brief for a team of experts from Edinburgh Napier University (Buchanan), the University of Glasgow (Professor Muhammad Imran and Professor Jill Pell), the University of Edinburgh (Dr Claudia Pagliari) and University of Strathclyde (Dr Sanna Rimpiläinen). This brief involved a review the usage of contact tracing applications. Buchanan focused on answering the question, "How might the distributed system be architected to be secure and respectful of privacy from the outset?". Overall, each of the experts then reviewed key areas around the usage of contract tracing, and submitted a compiled report answering the key questions:

• Buchanan, B., Imran, M., Pagliari, C., Pell, J., & Rimpiläinen, S. (2020). Use Of Participatory Apps In Contact Tracing: Options And Implications for Public Health, Privacy and Trust. Glasgow: Digital Health and Care Institute, University of Strathclyde.

Buchanan also applied his applied cryptography knowledge to areas of COVID-19 track and trace methods. This included collaborated work with the University of Glasgow on a blockchain-based methods named BeepTrace. Buchanan also worked with teams on privacy-aware COVID-19 passwords using the Ethereum platform, reviewed the state-of-the-art in privacy-aware applications for track and trace, and implemented privacy aware identity matching.

Related outputs include:

• Buchanan, W. J., Imran, M. A., Ur-Rehman, M., Zhang, L., Abbasi, Q. H., Chrysoulas, C., ... & Papadopoulos, P. (2020). Review and critical analysis of privacy-preserving infection tracking and contact tracing. Frontiers in Communications and Networks, 1, 583376.
• Xu, H., Zhang, L., Onireti, O., Fang, Y., Buchanan, W. J., & Imran, M. A. (2020). BeepTrace: Blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving contact tracing for COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 8(5), 3915-3929.
• Barati, M., Buchanan, W. J., Lo, O., & Rana, O. (2021, December). A privacy-preserving distributed platform for COVID-19 vaccine passports. In Proceedings of the 14th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing Companion (pp. 1-6).
• Abramson, W., Buchanan, W. J., Sayeed, S., Pitropakis, N., & Lo, O. (2021, December). PAN-DOMAIN: Privacy-preserving Sharing and Auditing of Infection Identifier Matching. In 2021 14th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (SIN) (Vol. 1, pp. 1-8). IEEE.

MPhil and PhD supervision

Buchanan has supervised 37 PhD and MPhil students to successful completion. These include:

• Dr Nikos Migas, "MARIAN: Mobile Agents for Routing in Ad-Hoc Networks", PhD, 2002-2005.
• Dr Jamie Graves, "Forensic verification of operating system activity via novel data, acquisition and analysis techniques", PhD, 2005-2009.
• Dr Zbigniew Kwecka, "Cryptographic privacy-preserving enhancement method for investigative data acquisition", PhD, 2006-2011.
• Dr Nicole van Deursen, "HI-Risk: a socio-technical method to identify and monitor heathcare information security risks in the information society", PhD, 2009-2014.
• Dr Solomon Uwagbole, "A pattern-driven corpus to predictive analytics in mitigating SQL injection attack", PhD, 2011-2018.
• Dr Phil Penrose, "Forensic analysis of large capacity digital storage devices", PhD, 2013-2017.
• Dr Grzegorz Spyra, "Embedded document security using sticky policies and identity based encryption", PhD, 2013-2019.
• Dr Adrian Smales. "Test-bed and evaluation of a home-based adverse event prediction infrastructure", PhD, 2013-2021.
• Dr Peter Mclaren, "Investigations into decrypting live secure traffic in virtual environments", PhD, 2016-2019.
• Dr Pavlos Papadopoulos, "Privacy-preserving systems around security, trust and identity", PhD, 2019-2022.

Research projects

Buchanan has undertaken many research and innovation projects over the years, including recent ones of:

• Distributed single sign-on-stack-on e-Governance Paradigm based on a distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) file exchange network for security, transparency, cost effectiveness and trust - GLASS. EU Horizon, Jan 2021-Dec 2023.
• KTP Miracl, Innovate UK, Apr 2023-Oct 2025.
• TruElect, Innovate UK, Dec 2022-Mar 2023.
• TRUSTEE (Trust and Privacy Preserving Computing Platform for Crossborder Federation of Personal Data), EU Horizon, Jul 2022-Dec 2025.
• AI-based privacy-preserving biometric authentication with mass-market smart devices, The Data Lab, Oct 2021-Sept 2024.
• PhD Studentship, CyberHunt, The Research Funding Council of Norway, Feb 2021-Jan 2025.
• PhD Studentship (Homomorphic Encryption), 6G Health Institute GmbH, Oct 2023-Sept 2026.
• MemCrypt (HGSP), Scottish Enterprise, Sep 2020-Mar 2021.

DACAR (Data Capture and Auto Identification Reference)

Buchanan was the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Edinburgh Napier University work within the EPSRC/TSB (Technology Strategy Board)-funded DACAR project, and which focused on citizen rights to share data within heath care. It ran from November 2009 until November 2011 and involved a collaboration between CipherLab, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, GS1 UK, Imperial College London, and Kodit. A core contribution of the project was the creation of the SPoC (Single Point of Contact) approach to information sharing, and the integration of identity, role and access rights to every part of the capture, storage and consumption of health care data. Its integration within Chelsea and Westminster Hospital was led by Professor Derek Bell.

The project was the first time that Buchanan formally worked with Professor Christoph Thummler, and who, at the time, had a post as a clinician at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and at Edinburgh Napier University. The core research team also involved Dr Owen Lo and Dr Lu Fan. The integration of GS1 UK allowed the integration of emerging RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) standards into the identification of medical artifacts, including tracking beds and medical equipment around the hospital.

After this project, Dr Owen Lo continued to work with Buchanan on a number of research projects, and was a co-inventor within the Cyan Forensics spin-out company and which changed its name to Cyacomb.

Scalable and Open Framework for Human/Digital Trust between Informal/Formal Personal Health Care Infrastructures

From March 2011 to July 2013, Buchanan continued to partner with Professor Christoph Thummler, Dr Owen Lo and Dr Lu Fan, and was the Principal Investigator (PI) on the ESPRC-funded, "Scalable and Open Framework for Human/Digital Trust between Informal/Formal Personal Health Care Infrastructures" project. This extended the work from the DACAR project but focused on assisted living, and involved a collaboration with Microsoft and HoIP (Health Over IP). While DACAR had focused on the sharing of health care information around hospitial data, this project extented the core concepts to create a novel governance policy infrastructure using a circle-of-trust relationship for assisted living. This linked to formal, role-based security for primary and secondary health care. New work also included the integration of the SPoC approach with the Microsoft Health Vault.

At the time, the work was known as Cloud4Health, and Buchanan gave an overview of the approach in a submission for a Scotland IS award in May 2012. Overall, the work in this project and DACAR laid the technical foundation for the Symphonic spin-out company from Edinburgh Napier University in 2013. It also the main focuse for the 4* rated - quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour - impact case study for UoA 11 in REF 2021 entitled, "Enabling Sensitive Personal Data to be Shared with Trust using Novel Digital Security Methods".

GLASS research project

Buchanan is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Edinburgh Napier University work within the EU Horizon funded GLASS project, and which is a new paradigm for sharing or transfer of personal information with the citizen in control. It started in January 2021 and completed in December 2023 (Grant aggrement No 959879). The research project includ es collaborators from TAGES (Teknoloji Arastirma ve Gelistirme Endustriyel Urunler Bilisim Teknolojileri San. ve Tic. A.S.), Fraunhofer FOKUS, UBITECH Limited, University of Patras, Suite 5, Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance, and Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. This has built a citizen focused digital wallet and new models data sharing using Hyperledger Fabric and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). In 2022, the GLASS project received "Leading Light Innovation" award at the Scottish Cybersecurity Awards.

vSoC (Virtual SOC)

Buchanan has innovated the vSoC teaching and training environment within Edinburgh Napier University, and which is used by students within the cybersecurity and networking-related subjects. The work started within a grant funded by DG Home related to the "Prevention Of and Fight against Crime" theme and was entitled, "DFET (Digital Forensics Evaluation and Training)". It was led by Buchanan, and included collaborators of Stefan Institute (JSI), Stockholm University, Police Scotland, and Aconite Internet Solutions. This provided the basic cloud infrastructure for the environment and used a VMWare vSphere virtualised environment that was hosted within the Merchiston Campus at Edinburgh Napier University. From December 2015 to February 2017, the Advanced HE advanced the work by funding a project entitled, "vSOC - Virtualised Security Operations Centre", and which scaled vSoC into cybersecurity areas. The work continued with the funding of a KTP (Knowledge Transfer Parternship) from Innovate UK and Satisnet Limited and which integrated SIEM tools into the environment. From June 2019 to May 2020, The Data Lab funded integrated of data science and cybersecurity.

Side Channel Analysis - Noise and RF Emmission

Buchanan's work with Dr Owen Lo and Dr Nilupulee Gunathilake has included an analysis of side channel attacks on the cryptography running on embedded devices using electrical noise generation and radio emissions. From Jan 2017 to Jan 2017, Buchanan and Owen Lo worked with Keysight on research related to "Bare Metal Forensics - Pattern Analysis Heuristics - Data Analysis", and co-funded by The Data Lab. This resulted in a paper entitled, "Power analysis attacks on the AES-128 S-box using differential power analysis (DPA) and correlation power analysis (CPA)" and which cracked 128-bit AES encryption on an Arduino Uno from the electrical noise generated from the device. Douglas Carson from Keysight and Lo presented the work live on 21 September 2016 at an event in Edinburgh.

Lo, Buchanan and Carson also managed to break the PRESENT block cipher on an embedded device using CPA (Correlation Power Analysis) and electrical noise generation. Gunathilake has since advanced the work in the analysis of radio emission from devices, including the cracking of the PRESENT light-weight encryption method. The work includes:

• Lo, O., Buchanan, W. J., & Carson, D. (2017). Power analysis attacks on the AES-128 S-box using differential power analysis (DPA) and correlation power analysis (CPA). Journal of Cyber Security Technology, 1(2), 88-107.
• Lo, O., Buchanan, W. J., & Carson, D. (2018, August). Correlation power analysis on the PRESENT block cipher on an embedded device. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (pp. 1–6).
• Gunathilake, N. A., Al-Dubai, A., Buchanan, W. J., & Lo, O. (2022, January). Electromagnetic side-channel attack resilience against present lightweight block cipher. In 2022 6th International Conference on Cryptography, Security and Privacy (CSP) (pp. 51–55). IEEE.

Ransomware research projects

Dr Gordon Russell, Dr Thomas Tan and Buchanan were part of Peter McLaren's PhD supervision, and which resulted in a thesis entitled, "Investigations into decrypting live secure traffic in virtual environments". Buchanan then was the Principal Investigator (PI) for the "MemCrypt" research project and which was funded from Sept 2020 to March 2021 by Scottish Enterrprise within its High Growth Spin-out Programme. Dr Owen Lo and McLaren then developed the work on the detection of encryption keys in memory, and scaled it to work with the detection of a range of ransomware families. From April 2020 to July 2020, Buchanan led an Innovate UK CyberASAP grant, and which continued to a second phase from Sept 2020 to Feb 2021. This resulted in a spin-out company in January 2021 with Peter Jaco as CEO, and Peter Mclaren at CTO. Significant research outputs from research work includes:

• McLaren, P., Russell, G., & Buchanan, B. (2017, July). Mining malware command and control traces. In 2017 Computing Conference (pp. 788–794). IEEE.
• McLaren, P., Buchanan, W. J., Russell, G., & Tan, Z. (2019). Deriving ChaCha20 key streams from targeted memory analysis. Journal of Information Security and Applications, 48, 102372.
• Buchanan, Bill; Mclaren, Peter & Gordon, Russell et al., "Detection of ransomware", issued 2022-09-22.

Buchanan continues to work on ransomware work with Simon Davis and Rich Macfarlane, and recent work includes:

• Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2020). Evaluation of live forensic techniques in ransomware attack mitigation. Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation, 33, 300979.
• Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2021). Differential area analysis for ransomware attack detection within mixed file datasets. Computers & Security, 108, 102377.
• Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2022, January). Review of Current Ransomware Detection Techniques. In Proc. of the 7 th International Conference on Engineering and Emerging Technologies (ICEET). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
• Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2022). Comparison of Entropy Calculation Methods for Ransomware Encrypted File Identification. Entropy, 24(10), 1503.

Health Care-related research

Along with cybersecurity and cryptography, Buchanan has a driving passion for improving health care through research methods, and with a special focus on citizen-focused care. This can be traced back to work from March 2011 to July 2013, and where he led work at Edinburgh Napier University in a partnership with Edinburgh Napier University, Microsoft and HoIP. This project was funded by EPSRC and entitled, "Scalable and Open Framework for Human/Digital Trust between Informal/Formal Personal Health Care Infrastructures". It involved the creation of a novel governance policy infrastructure using a circle-of-trust relationship for assisted living, and with links to formal, role-based security for primary and secondary health care.

Buchanan then teamed up with his PhD student (Adrian Smales), and kick-started the "e-FRAIL - Early detection of FRAilty and Illness" research project and which ran from October 2015 to December 2016 and funded by the Digital Health Institute (DHI). The partnership continued to advance from August 2017 to Feb 2018 with "e-Frail - Phase 2" which added key risk assessments using a Delphi method for understanding of fraility. This led to a collaboration with CM2000 on the development of the Advanced Risk Modelling for Early Detection (ARMED) product and which won the ‘Innovation of the Year’ award at Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards in 2020.

Alongside the work on fraility, Buchanan led a number of research which integrated digital trust and blockchain into next generation health care systems. This involved leading a research project for the tracking of medical devices within a health care environment though public blockchain methods. The work involved a collaboration with Spiritus within the "Health Blockchain" project and was funded by The Data Lab (August 2017-March 2019). Work continued with the development of a trusted health care infrastructure with "Next Generation Trust Architecture" from March 2018 to February 2020, and "Next Generation Connectivity with Health and Well-being" from October 2018 to July 2021. Both were frunded and funded by the DHI. New research work involves the investigation of 6G and homomorphic encryption methods with privacy-aware health care records.

Selected health care related papers include:

• Fan, L., Buchanan, W., Thummler, C., Lo, O., Khedim, A., Uthmani, O., ... & Bell, D. (2011, July). DACAR platform for eHealth services cloud. In 2011 IEEE 4th international conference on cloud computing (pp. 219–226). IEEE.
• Thuemmler, C., Fan, L., Buchanan, W. J., Lo, O., Ekonomou, E., & Khedim, A. S. (2012). E-health: Chances and challenges of distributed, service oriented architectures.
• Van Deursen, N., Buchanan, W. J., & Duff, A. (2013). Monitoring information security risks within health care. computers & security, 37, 31-45.
• Thuemmler, C., Rolffs, C., Bollmann, A., Hindricks, G., & Buchanan, W. (2018, October). Requirements for 5G based telemetric cardiac monitoring. In 2018 14th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob) (pp. 1–4). IEEE.
• Bell, L., Buchanan, W. J., Cameron, J., & Lo, O. (2018). Applications of Blockchain Within Healthcare. Blockchain in healthcare today.
• Abubakar, M., McCarron, P., Jaroucheh, Z., Al Dubai, A., & Buchanan, B. (2021, December). Blockchain-based Platform for Secure Sharing and Validation of Vaccination Certificates. In 2021 14th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (SIN) (Vol. 1, pp. 1–8). IEEE.

After completing his PhD in 2021, Adrian Smales left the research team to join Smplicare as the Chief Innovation Officer.

Selected research works

Selected publications include:

• Xu, H., Zhang, L., Onireti, O., Fang, Y., Buchanan, W. J., & Imran, M. A. (2020). BeepTrace: Blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving contact tracing for COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 8(5), 3915-3929.
• Popov, S., & Buchanan, W. J. (2021). Fpc-bi: Fast probabilistic consensus within byzantine infrastructures. Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing, 147, 77-86.
• Davies, S. R., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2021). Differential area analysis for ransomware attack detection within mixed file datasets. Computers & Security, 108, 102377.
• Li, S., Choo, K. K. R., Sun, Q., Buchanan, W. J., & Cao, J. (2019). IoT forensics: Amazon echo as a use case. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 6(4), 6487-6497.
• Masood, F., Driss, M., Boulila, W., Ahmad, J., Rehman, S. U., Jan, S. U., ... & Buchanan, W. J. (2022). A lightweight chaos-based medical image encryption scheme using random shuffling and XOR operations. Wireless Personal Communications, 127(2), 1405-1432.
• Lo, O., Buchanan, W. J., & Carson, D. (2017). Power analysis attacks on the AES-128 S-box using differential power analysis (DPA) and correlation power analysis (CPA). Journal of Cyber Security Technology, 1(2), 88-107.
• Kim, T. H., Goyat, R., Rai, M. K., Kumar, G., Buchanan, W. J., Saha, R., & Thomas, R. (2019). A novel trust evaluation process for secure localization using a decentralized blockchain in wireless sensor networks. IEEE access, 7, 184133-184144.
• Sieklik, B., Macfarlane, R., & Buchanan, W. J. (2016). Evaluation of TFTP DDoS amplification attack. computers & security, 57, 67-92.

Academic spin-outs

Buchanan has led research which has led to three successful spin-out companies: Zonefox, Symphonic and Cyan Forensics. In October 2018, Zonefox was acquired by Fortinet, and in November 2020, Symphonic were acquired by Ping Identity.

Zonefox

The work of Dr Jamie Graves and Buchanan on a PhD project ("Forensic verification of operating system activity via novel data, acquisition and analysis techniques") led to the incorporation of Inquisitive Systems Limited in 2008. This led to the submission of patents entitled "Improvements in or relating to digital forensics" and "Digital Forensics" in Oct 2008, and Sept 2009, respectively. The "Improvements in or relating to digital forensics" was published for world-wide status in March 2010, and granted in the EU in May 2019. The "Digital Forensics" patent was granted on Nov 2014 for the US.

The patents captured the core research: defining activity footprints as a ‘digital DNA’ sequence, which can be used with a new matching algorithm (BLAST DNA) to determine the probability of a sequence match to a malicious event, significantly outperforming existing signature-based methods. This proved particularly useful in detecting insider threats such as copying source-code to a USB device. The original patent owner was Edinburgh Napier University, and where the existing EU patent is owned by Fortinet Inc.

After funding from Scottish Enterprise in the Proof of Concept programme from September 2008 to August 2010, the research work was spun-out from Edinburgh Napier University in September 2010, and where Graves was the CEO, and who continued in this post until Zonefox was acquired by Fortinet Inc. The company, in 2013, changed its trading name to Zonefox. On 23 October 2018, Fortinet Inc announced that it had fully acquired Zonefox and that Zonefox's product range would be integrated into the Fortinet Security Fabric offering. Edinburgh Napier University was one of the significant shareholders in the acquistion, along with the co-inventors.

Graves returned back to Edinburgh Napier University in Feb 2021 to take up a post "Entrepreneur in Residence" with a Royal Society-funded grant.

Symphonic

For over a decade, Buchanan has run research work related to sharing and integrating the rights of the citizen. It addresses gaps around data governance related to ownership rights, governance, and privacy through the creation of a framework that set out new processes relating to citizen-defined access policies. A major output of the work was the Symphonic Trust spin-out, and which was acquired by Ping Identity in 2020.

The research began in 2008 with a collaboration with Police Scotland, looking at weaknesses around information sharing within law enforcement, and in developed new ways to integrate large-scale integration of rights across interconnected domains. It resulted in the submission of a patent for the US in January 2013, for the World in Jun 2014. The US patent was granted in July 2014.

Other related research led by Buchanan was funded within two EPSRC/Innovate UK funded projects: "Data Capture and Auto Identification Reference" (DACAR) and "Scalable and Open Framework for Human/Digital Trust between Informal/Formal Personal Health Care Infrastructures". This work was then further developed by introducing the concept of data-buckets owned by the citizen, and in the concept of using a SPoC (Single Point of Contact) for sharing information between interconnected domains.

From March 2012 to October 2013, the work was in a project entitled, "sa.FIRE" (Secure Analysis and FIltering Risk Engine) and funded from Scottish Enterprise on their HGSP programme, and where Derick James, Richard Lewis (as a Commercial Champion) and Niall Burns came on board. The company spun out of Edinburgh Napier University in 2014, and received initial investment from Par Equity. Derick James became the CEO and Niall Burns was the CTO. The company eventually dropped the "Trust" part of its name and just traded as Symphonic. On 2 November 2020, it announced that Symphonic had been acquired by Ping Identity for $32 million. Edinburgh Napier University was one of the significant shareholders in the acquistion, along with the co-inventors (Buchanan, Dr Lu Fan, Alistair Lawson and Omair Uthmani).

Cyacomb

From 2014 to 2017, Buchanan and Rich Macfarlane supervised Dr Phil Penrose for a PhD. The work was submitted in 2017, and entitled "Forensic analysis of large capacity digital storage devices". This core work led to a UK patent application entitled, "Method for identification of digital content" in April 2017. The UK patent was granted in the UK in June 2021, and published as a World patent in October 2018, an EU patent in February 2020, a Canadian patent in October 2018, and a US patent in September 2021.

From March 2015 to January 2016, the work was funded by Scottish Enterprise as part of a Proof of Concept grant. In Jne 2016, Cyan Forensics was first incorporated, and became a spin-out from Edinburgh Napier University. The CEO was Ian Stevenson and the CTO was Bruce Ramsay. The co-inventors of the core technology for the spin-out were Buchanan, Dr Phil Penrose, Rich Macfarlane, Bruce Ramsay and Dr Owen Lo.

In March 2022, Cyan Forensics changed their trading name to Cyacomb. In 2022, Cyacomb were awarded with a Technology Pioneer by World Economic Forum, and an innovation award winner at the GovTech Summit in 2019. The company also received a Cybersecurity award in the same year for "Best Cyber Breakthrough" in 2019 at the Scottish Cyber Awards.

Par Equity led a £5 million Series A funding round in March 2021.

In 2022, Ian Stevenson, the CEO of Cyacomb, wrote an open letter to the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture Media and Sport related to the uses of encrypted messaging in the UK with the comment of "To pass the Online Safety Bill in a form that does not allow for the possibility of secure, privacy protecting CSAM detection solutions now or in the future would be to miss a crucial opportunity to do enormous good".

MemCrypt

Buchanan supported the creation of the MemCrypt spin-out, and which focuses on the discovery of cryptographic keys in memory (based on the PhD work of Dr Peter McLaren). The team then progressed this work by including triage methods into the discovery of encryption keys within memory. Key contributions include being the first to detect the presence of ChaCha20 encryption keys in running memory (one of the most popular encryption methods used in secure communications), and identifying a major vulnerability within tools such as OpenSSL.

The work has since been applied to ransomware detection and recovery. From September 2020 until March 2021, the work received funding from Scottish Enterprise as part of their HGSP grant awards, and, from September 2020 until Feb 2021 from the Innovate UK Cyber ASAP programme. MemCrypt Limited spun out of Edinburgh Napier University in Oct 2020 and incorporated in Jun 2021. In November 2021, the research work related to MemCrypt received a Leading Light Innovation award at the Scottish Cybersecurity awards.

Learning and Teaching

In 2018, Buchanan became a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (PFHEA). He is the creator and sole author of the Asecuritysite.com web site, and which focuses on covering cryptography and various areas of networking and cybersecurity, from both a theoretical and practical approach. Buchanan was also the software creator of the Bright Red Publishing Digital Zone, and which contains Web-based content for many of the subjects included in the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) N5, Higher and Advanced Higher syllabus' in Scotland.

He has also created a number of novel learning environments, including vSoC (Virtualised Security Operation Center) and which is a cloud-based infrastructure for cybersecurity learning. Along with this, Buchanan has developed an online Cipher Capture The Flag set of challenges, and Web-based Cisco device simulators (previously known as Networksims ProfSIMs).

Buchanan writes on areas of cryptography, cybersecurity and computer science within the blog entiled "ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice" and has a YouTube channel containing a range of lectures, tutorials and demonstrations, along with related Apple, Spotify and Audible podcasts. In this teaching, He has received a number of teaching-related awards, including for the Best Lecturer for Computing in the ENSA Student-voted Excellence Awards in the School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment in 2019, 2020 and 2023. In 2017, he was awarded with the "Cyber Evangelist of the Year" at the first Scottish Cybersecurity awards.

Bright Red Publishing Digital Zone

Bright Red Publishing is an Edinburgh-based book publisher that focus on textbooks for schools related to N5, Higher and Advanced Higher topics. The first phase of the first between a collaboration between Bright Red Publishing and Buchanan ran from July 2012 to Dec 2012, and was funded by Interface Online. This created the Digital Zone and which was an innovative method of converting electronic version of the books into an online format, while provided a novel range of Mathematics and Physics abstactions, such as for formula translation and solution checkers. It was coded in C# and uses a Microsoft ASP.NET infrastructure. The second phase of the collaboration focused on "Innovation and Integrated Learning Environment for Engaging and Ever-changing Educational Content". It involved using Buchanan developing a dynamic challenges in the generation for test questions. This allowed for template questions, and which could be used to generate ever-changing questions. Buchanan and Bright Red Publishing have continued to collaborate, and with 26 N5 books, 20 Higher books, and eight Advanced Higher Books. All of the code produced for the Digital Zone was written by Buchanan.

Cryptography

Buchanan teaches Network Security and Applied Cryptography in the School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment at Edinburgh Napier University, and his reseach focus is around digital identity, cryptography and blockchain. This applies into areas of health care and cybersecurity. He is the sole author and creator of ASecuritySite, and which hosts a wide range of cryptography applications, including within public key encryption, symmetric key encryption, digital signatures and key exchange methods.

Buchanan is documented as a passioniate believer in the power of cryptography in building a more trusted digital world, "I believe that we live in a digital world that was created in the 20th Century. We thus need to build a more trusted world, and put the rights of the citizen at the centre of this world. This new world will respect privacy, consent and ownership, and we should be able to trust every single transaction." In July 2023, he was one of the 68 signatories on an open letter related to the UK's Online Safety Bill.

For privacy-aware COVID-19 tracing, Buchanan collaborated on work related to the usage of privacy-aware blockchain methods and applied cryptography. His work, too, has involved the creation of new methods to detect ransomware. This has included the discovery of encryption keys in memory, and in the usage of entropy detection methods.

Invited Talks and Engagements

Over the years Buchanan has presented at many events, and has a reputation for high impact, fun and engaging presentations. This has included live demonstrations of cyber security threats. With a documentary on Cyber Security, broadcast on Monday 8 November 2015, Buchanan and his team set up a fake Web site for hackers to gain access to, as part of the BBC Panorama programme. In 2016, Buchanan was also included in the FutureScot list for the "Top 50 Scottish Tech People Who Are Changing The World".

Invited talks

Examples of recent invited presentations include:

• Apr 2017, presented an invited for Sidney Michaelson Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Science Festival.
• Oct 2017, presented an invited talk at Scotchain 17 at the RBS Gogarburn Campus.
• Dec 2018, presented at FutureScot 2018 on innovation.
• Jun 2018, presented at the Crypto Valley Conference on Blockchain Technology in Zug, Switzerland.
• Jun 2019, presented on "Creating a more trusted, secure and citizen-focused world" at Cybersecurity (Public Sector) 2019.
• Oct 2019, presented an invited talk at Interrupt 19 at West Lothian College.
• Nov 2019, presented at invited talk on "The Risks of Cybersecurity" at Digit Expo 2019 in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
• Jun 2020, presented in the "Security and Resilience at the Heart of Transformation" session at Digital Scotland 2020.
• Mar 2021, presented "Innovation in Cybersecurity" at Scot-Secure Virtual Summit.
• Nov 2021, presented, "Cybersecurity Threats", at Digital Scotland 2021.
• Feb 2022, presented on "Building a more trusted digital world" at FutureScot Annual Conference.
• Feb 2023, presented in "The future of cybersecurity: Offering citizens a safer digital world, from digital signing, to quantum, AI defence and the blockchain" session at FutureScot Cybersecurity 2023.

He regularly presents in the media, including with a podcast on the BBC World Service entitled, "Will we ever run out of cloud storage?".

Interviews with World-leaders in Cryptography

Buchanan's passion for cryptography is evident from his social media presence, teaching and research. He has a deep interest in understanding the motivations and the lives of those who have led the way in cryptography. This passion has been integrated with his teaching through a series of talks entitled, "World-leaders in Cryptography".

Martin (Marty) Hellman - ACM Turing Award winner in 2015 - has appeared twice in this series, and who oulined his work as one of the co-creators of public key encryption, and on his work alongside Whitfield Diffie in the creation of the widely used Diffie-Hellman method. In an interview on 10 March 2023, Hellman outlined an event in 1984 where Adi Shamir broke the Merkle-Hellman public key encryption method at a live Rump session at a conference.

On 1 April 2023, Buchanan interviewed another Turing Prize Award winner - Len Adleman - and who outlined how Martin Gardner's opened up the world to the RSA method. In Feb 2023, Buchanan interviewed Neal I. Koblitz - the co-inventor of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington. Within this interview, Neal outlined how the work of Hendrick Lenstra showed how elliptic curves could be factoring large integers and attacking RSA, and it was this work his motivated him to co-invent Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC).

Another key inventor within public key encryption was Tahir ElGamal - the creator of the ElGamal encryption and signature method. Buchanan interview him on 27 October 2022, and outlined that his PhD supervisor (Martin Hellman) told him, "here are 12 problems that are not solvable at the current time, go investigate them".

In an interview on April 2023, Torben P Pedersen - the inventor of the Pedersen commitment - outlined, "At the time, there was also inefficient commitments, that had the property of being unconditionally hiding, and I thought it would be nice to have a verifiable secret share where you don’t have to rely on any computational assumptions, in order to be sure that your secret is not revealed when you do a secret share".

Other interviews have include Jean-Philippe (JP) Aumasson (co-inventor of the BLAKE hashing method) on 11 February 2023, Professor Keith Martin (from Royal Holloway, University of London) - on 3 July 2020, and Nick Sullivan - the Head of Research at Cloudflare - on 1 May 2020.

Awards and recognition

Buchanan's awards and recent recognition includes:

• In 2015, named in the "50 most influential UK higher education professionals on social media".
• In 2016, awarded "Cyber Evangelist of the Year" at the first Scottish Cybersecurity awards, along with leading a project that was awarded the best collaborative project with Police Scotland.
• In 2016, gave a keynote talk on Cybersecurity at SISCA DEMOfest 2016.
• In 2016, included in the "The Digital List: 50 people from various areas of Scotland’s technology industries who are changing the world".
• In 2017, appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to cyber security, and was the first person to receive an OBE related to cyber security.
• From 2017-2021, appointed Chief Editor of the Journal of Cybersecurity Technology.
• In 2018, received an "Outstanding Contribution to Knowledge Exchange" award at the Scottish Knowledge Exchange awards.
• In 2018, appointed co-Chair on Technical Committee for IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society (SMC) on Blockchain.
• In 2018, became a member of the IOTA Research Council.
• In 2019, presented a keynote talk at the 5th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP).
• In 2019, awarded an Honorary Professorship from Spoleczna Akademia Nauk.
• In 2019, awarded best Best Lecturer/Tutor in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University within the student-nominated excellence awards.
• From 2020, served as co-Chief Editor of Blockchain in Health Today.
• In 2020, awarded best Best Lecturer/Tutor in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University within the student-nominated excellence awards.
• In 2020, Advanced Risk Modelling for Early Detection (ARMED) product won the ‘Innovation of the Year’ award at Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards (with CM200 and Adrian Smales).
• In 2021, presented a keynote talk at the 14th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks.
• In 2021, winner of the Best Paper Award at 14th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks for the paper entitled, "PAN-DOMAIN: Privacy-preserving Sharing and Auditing of Infection Identifier Matching".
• In 2022, the EU-funded GLASS project won the Leading Light Innovation Award at the Scottish Cyber Awards, of which he is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the project.
• In 2022, presented a keynote at talk entitled "The Future of Cryptography, Blockchain and Trust" at International Blockchain Summit Istanbul, 2022.
• In 2022, presented a keynote talk at Cyber Security 2023 in Cardiff.
• In 2023, appointed to the Advisory Board of the Zero Trust Special Interest Group.
• In 2023, awarded best Best Lecturer/Tutor in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University within the student-nominated excellence awards.
• In 2023, appointed the co-Chair for Blockchain & FinTech within IEEE Blockchain Technical Community (BCTC).