Security and Safety Fundamentals
Foundations for security-informed safety reasoning.
Security-Informed Safety Education Network
SISEN provides teaching materials and practical demonstrations for understanding how security failures in IoT and cyber-physical systems can become safety hazards.
Explore SISEN
Teaching Materials
Lectures
Slides, recordings, CyBOK mapping, and future teaching resources.
Practical LearningActivities
Lab scenarios, setup guidance, videos, and safety-analysis materials.
Shared ResourceCyBOK Mapping
Explore how SISEN lectures align with CyBOK sections, Knowledge Areas, and detailed subsections.
Instructor ResourceSISEN Instructor Guide
Guidance for instructors using SISEN lectures, scenarios, and practical activities.
Teaching ResourceSISEN Teaching and Integration Guide
Support for integrating SISEN materials into teaching, labs, and course delivery.
RepositorySISEN GitHub Repository
Access the public SISEN source repository, teaching materials, and project files.
Lectures
Browse the SISEN lecture programme and open the slides or video recording directly.
Security-Informed Safety
Connecting security evidence to safety claims.
Hazard Analysis and Assurance
Hazard identification, argumentation, and assurance evidence.
IoT and Cyber-Physical Systems
Connected-system architectures, dependencies, and attack surfaces.
Wireless and Short-Range Threats
Wireless, Bluetooth, and proximity-based security issues.
IoT in Safety-Critical Contexts
Domain-specific safety implications for connected systems.
Resilience and Mitigation
Keeping systems safe when security controls fail.
Applied Case Studies
Case-led security-informed safety analysis.
Lecture Resources
Lab Setup and Resources
The SISEN activities connect lab setup, scenario walkthroughs, attack observations, and safety reflection within one teaching workflow.
Lab Setup Recording
Lab Scenarios
SISEN Scenarios, Dashboard and Normal Operation
This video introduces the SISEN platform and demonstrates its normal operation. It shows how to start the platform, select a scenario, observe simulated telemetry in the terminal and dashboard, move between the Smart Building, Medical IoT and 6LoWPAN scenarios, and stop the environment safely.
Smart Building IoT
Smart-building sensors, MQTT messaging, dashboard observation, and safety analysis.
Open guideMedical IoT
Simulated wearable telemetry, gateway behaviour, data integrity, and patient-safety reasoning.
Open guide6LoWPAN
Constrained wireless communication, low-power IPv6 telemetry, and safety-relevant disruption.
Open guideAttack, Disruption and Analysis Demonstrations
The demonstrations cover traffic observation, controlled attacks, representative disruption examples, Wireshark analysis, wireless handshake capture, and reporting through hazard analysis. Additional activities and commands are provided in the SISEN Attack and Disruption Guide.
Normal Operation and Traffic Capture
This video demonstrates how to observe and capture network traffic while a SISEN scenario is operating normally. It covers MQTT topic observation, packet capture, saving evidence to the captures directory, and opening captured traffic for later analysis.
Running Controlled Attacks in SISEN
This video explains the general workflow for running controlled attacks in SISEN. It shows how to list the available attacks, filter them by scenario or category, launch an attack from a separate terminal, observe its effect on telemetry and the dashboard, and return the scenario to normal operation.
SISEN Attack and Disruption Examples
This video demonstrates representative examples from the SISEN attack and disruption categories, including confidentiality, authenticity, integrity, replay, availability, protocol-path disruption and a scenario-focused safety case. The demonstrations show how manipulated, delayed, replayed or unavailable telemetry can affect monitoring and create potential safety consequences in simulated IoT and cyber-physical systems.
Analysing Attack Traffic in Wireshark
This video examines traffic captured during the SISEN attack and disruption demonstrations. It shows how to open capture files in Wireshark, apply relevant display filters, inspect MQTT topics and message contents, compare normal and manipulated traffic, and identify evidence associated with spoofing, integrity manipulation, replay and availability disruption.
WPA2 Wireless Traffic and Handshake Capture
This video demonstrates wireless traffic capture in the WPA2-enabled SISEN Smart Building scenario. It shows how to create a temporary monitor-mode interface, capture IEEE 802.11 traffic, reconnect a simulated wireless node, and identify the resulting EAPOL handshake packets in Wireshark. The demonstration illustrates how wireless authentication activity can be observed and recorded for security analysis within the simulated SISEN environment.
Reporting and Hazard Analysis
This video demonstrates how evidence collected during a SISEN activity can be documented and used to complete the reporting and hazard-analysis process. It shows how observations from the dashboard, terminal output and packet captures are linked to the security event, potential safety impact, mitigations and residual risk.
About SISEN
About the Project
The initial SISEN repository was developed for wireless security teaching on the BSc Cyber Security and Forensics programme at the University of Westminster. The project extends that work to focus on the security-informed safety aspects of Internet of Things and cyber-physical systems.
SISEN brings together lectures, practical scenarios, attack and disruption demonstrations, and structured hazard-analysis activities to support the study of how cyber security failures may contribute to safety-relevant conditions.
SISEN forms part of the CyBOK Security-Informed Safety educational resources programme and was developed with support from the 2025–2026 CyBOK funding round.
University of Westminster
The University of Westminster offers cyber security education through undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Cyber Security and Forensics. These courses provide a wider teaching context for SISEN and support practical learning in secure systems, digital investigation, networked technologies, and security-informed analysis.
Project Team
Dr Ayman El Hajjar
Project Lead
Senior Lecturer and Head of the Cyber Security Research Group at the University of Westminster.
Read biographyProfessor Tamas Kiss
Project Contributor
Professor of Distributed Computing at the University of Westminster.
Read biographyLincoln Silva Almeida
Research Associate
Senior DevOps and Cloud Engineer with expertise in secure cloud infrastructure, automation, and reproducible laboratory environments.
Read biographyDr Ayman El Hajjar
Project Lead
Dr Ayman El Hajjar is a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for the BSc Cyber Security and Forensics programme at the University of Westminster, where he also leads the Cyber Security Research Group. He previously served as Course Leader for the MSc Cyber Security and Forensics programme, during which the course achieved NCSC accreditation.
He holds an MSc in Wireless Networks from Queen Mary University of London and a PhD in Cryptography for the Internet of Things from Birkbeck, University of London.
His research focuses on the security and resilience of Internet of Things, cyber-physical, wireless, and distributed systems. His work includes secure information flow, cryptographic mechanisms, threat modelling, network and system integrity, and the relationship between cyber security failures and safety-relevant consequences. He is also interested in trustworthy AI, formal assurance, and reproducible security experimentation environments.
Back to Project TeamProfessor Tamas Kiss
Project Contributor
Tamas Kiss is a Professor of Distributed Computing at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Director of the Research Centre for Parallel Computing and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the School of Computer Science and Engineering. Since 2020, he is serving as Editor in Chief at the Journal of Grid Computing published by Springer Nature. He holds a PhD in Distributed Computing, and MSc Degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering.
Prof Kiss attracted over £65 Million research funding and he has been leading national and European research projects related to enterprise applications of cloud and distributed computing technologies in the past 15 years. He has been involved in more than 20 European and UK funded research projects as principal investigator or co-investigator. His current research focus is on the orchestration of the cloud to edge compute continuum.
Back to Project TeamLincoln Silva Almeida
Research Associate
Lincoln Almeida is a Senior DevOps and Cloud Engineer with a background in Electronics Engineering and extensive experience designing and automating secure cloud infrastructure, CI/CD platforms, Kubernetes environments, and Infrastructure as Code using technologies including AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Docker, and GitLab CI. He holds a BEng (Hons) in Electronics Engineering, during which he completed a year-long industrial placement at Broadcom as a Design Verification Engineer. More recently, he served as a Research Associate at the University of Westminster, contributing to the SISEN cyber-physical systems research project, where he worked on network simulation, IoT security, automation, and reproducible laboratory environments.
Back to Project TeamAcknowledgement
We are grateful to everyone who contributed ideas, expertise, testing, and feedback during the development of SISEN.
The National Cyber Security Centre uses CyBOK to describe the content of NCSC-certified degrees and assured commercial training. See the NCSC CyBOK information page and visit the CyBOK website for the Body of Knowledge and its educational resources.