Dr. Nikolaos (Nick) Pitropakis is an Associate Professor of cybersecurity at the School of Computing of Edinburgh Napier University, and a Fellow of the HEA. He is also core member of the Blockpass Identity Lab. Dr. Pitropakis has a strong research background in human factors in cyber security. His current research interests include trust and privacy using distributed ledger technology, adversarial machine learning, advanced cyber attack attribution, data science applied on cyber security and IoT devices security. Dr Pitropakis led the development of the School’s MSc Advanced Security and Digital Forensics (Myanmar), while including introducing new hybrid learning modes of study. He is teaching the Cyber-related graduate apprenticeship degrees, both running in Scotland and in England. He is also the external examiner of The American College in Greece (ACG), covering the BSc (Hons) Information Technology and BSc (Hons) Cyber Security and Networking programmes provided by The Open University.
Dr. Pitropakis is currently leading the H2020 project SinGLe Sign-on eGovernAnce paradigm based on a distributed file exchange network for Security, transparency, cost effectiveness and truSt. Prior to joining ENU in 2016, he has worked as Postdoctoral Researcher for the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was involved in a U.S. Department of Defense project (Methods for producing standardized and transparent attribution) worth of 17.3 million dollars aiming at advanced attribution of malicious parties. His work has impacted major trademark holders and especially average users, whose awareness was increased against the combosquatting abuse.
His recent work has included a £787,597 project in Cryptography and Privacy and a 250,000€ H2020 project. Dr. Pitropakis has established synergies around the UK with other centers of excellence in cyber security like Royal Holloway and the University of Surrey, where he has been invited as a guest speaker. Additionally, he and Professor Bill Buchanan have been working with international partners such as the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the University of Piraeus, and the University of Oslo.
Based on the outcomes of these projects, Dr. Pitropakis has published 30 quality scholarly articles. His most recent research achievements have been published in several highly cited Elsevier and Springer journals as well as Tier 1 international conferences. Dr. Pitropakis has also been invited to serve as an organizing and program committee member of major international conferences and a reviewer for prestigious journals. In addition, Dr. Pitropakis has been involved in supervising Research Master and PhD students since he accomplished his PhD in 2015. Currently, Dr. Pitropakis is supervising 3 PhD students, and their research activities are being disseminated in high quality conferences and journals.