TWO projects from Edinburgh Napier’s School of Computing have won funding from a programme which develops innovative cyber security ideas for the commercial market.

TrueDeploy and Trustd are being supported by CyberASAP, which is itself funded by the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport working with Innovate UK.

CyberASAP creates a pipeline to commercialise innovations from university labs, providing academics with the expertise, knowledge and training needed to convert their research into technologies, products and services.

The university’s TrueDeploy project, which is developing innovative technology to bring trust and transparency to the software supply chain, has already received backing from Scottish Enterprise as part of its high growth spin-out programme. Now it has been awarded £31,973 for the next four months as part of CyberASAP phase one.


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The dominance of open-source software and the "interconnectedness" of software between organisations has raised cyber security risks in the software supply chain, it is claimed.

Potentially ruinous attacks can occur when a threat actor infiltrates and compromises software being developed by a software vendor in the long chain that exists from code being written to it being distributed to a customer.

TrueDeploy aims to bring trust to the software supply chain with a novel combination of blockchain, credential management and access control technologies.

Research student Pavlos Papadopoulos, who leads the TrueDeploy technical team, said: “We greatly appreciate Innovate UK's support and the opportunity to participate in the Cyber security Academic Startup Accelerator Programme 2022-23.

“In the next few months, during this programme, we will investigate more deeply TrueDeploy's value proposition, validate our chosen market, and develop our novel solution further in combination with the Scottish Enterprise High Growth Spin-out Programme's continuous support.”

Web3 is an idea for a new iteration of the World Wide Web based on blockchain technology, which incorporates concepts including token-based economics and decentralised applications (DApps).

While an effective way for users to control their own data and digital assets, Web3 has not been widely adopted yet due to the complexity of managing users' wallets which allows them to access these DApps.

The “Trustd: Decentralised, trustworthy, and reliable digital assets custody solution” project is working to address the inherent challenges in establishing security protection for users’ wallets, and has been awarded £29,365 as part of CyberASAP phase one.

Dr Zakwan Jaroucheh, School of Computing lecturer, said: “Participation in CyberASAP is a great opportunity.  It will allow us to validate our value proposition and the market need for a decentralised digital assets custodial solution to advance Web3 mass adoption.”


‘Simply not enough’ female bosses in FTSE-100

ONLY nine FTSE-100 companies are run by female chief executives, with four of these groups in the financial sector, research by Robert Half shows.

The recruitment specialist observes this is “despite a drive for diversity at the top and numerous initiatives to support the progression of women in the workplace”.


​Businesses 'should solve their own skills shortages'

COMPANIES should not lay the blame for skills shortages in their workforces at the Government’s door and anyone who does is “hiding behind their incompetence”, according to two of Scotland’s most prominent business leaders.

Entrepreneurs Lord Willie Haughey and Sir Tom Hunter, speaking on the Go Radio Business Show with Hunter & Haughey yesterday, agreed that businesses should be coming up with solutions to address their own skills shortages – not relying on the Scottish Government to solve the problem for them.


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