Sotirios Katsikeas

I started my doctoral studies in September 2018 at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), in the Division of Network and Systems Engineering. Right now I am a PhD candidate and my main topic of research has been domain specific languages for cyber attack modeling and simulations. My main supervisor is professor Pontus Johnson and we belong to the Software Systems Architecture and Security research group. Currently, I am working towards the final steps for my Ph.D. degree here at KTH.

Research interests: My primary areas of interest are: cybersecurity modeling and attack simulations, cyber attack incident response, and cybersecurity inspired system design (secure-by-design).

Below you can also find some information about my academic career so far.

I have received my Diploma (5-year program) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the homonym school at Technical University of Crete at Chania in my home country, Greece. Then, I completed my postgraduate studies with a M.Sc in School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in 2018.

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Today we are so greatly dependent on technology that we no longer remember how our life would have been without it. Take the following scenario as an example, suddenly you see that you do not have internet access although you have electricity and your router seems to be working. The problem is not on your side but on the central servers of your internet provider. They have been attacked and as a result half of the country is without a usable internet connection.

Another scenario could be that you suddenly are without electricity and internet, you think it will be temporary but one hour has passed and no official information has reached you. You are starting to feel worried and you turn on a radio on Sveriges Radio only to find out that this is the result of an extensive cyber attack on the country's power grid.

All the above are possible scenarios in case of a cyber attack. The best way to be protected against such attack is cyber security awareness and preparedness. And how can this be done? By cyber security modeling and attack simulations. This means that a model of the actual system is created and then attack simulations are performed so that the vulnerable elements of the system to be detected. By doing this we can then improve the system's design and make more secure effectively stopping the possible attacks. And that is what my main topic of research is!