ESRC Digital Security by Design Social Science Hub+

Technological advances have done, and will do, much to improve cybersecurity. But, a technological approach is only part of the solution - achieving digital security is inherently a socio-technical endeavour. By combining world-leading research with challenge fellows from across the social sciences, expert working groups, innovative approaches to networking and agile, industry-facing commissioning, the DiScriBe Hub+ will not only address the challenges faced by the ISCF Digital Security by Design (DSbD) initiative, but will fundamentally reshape the ways in which social sciences and STEM disciplines work together to address the challenges of digital security by design in the 21st Century.

The core missions of the DiScriBe Hub+ are to provide interdisciplinary leadership to realise digital security by design by connecting social science to a hardware layer that rarely receives support or engagement from social science. This social science input will help to unleash the transformational potential that the hardware innovations within Digital Security by Design makes possible. The Hub+ has five main ways of doing this: 1) Running a series of deep engagements with DSbD stakeholders using techniques from the arts and humanities in order to elicit a shared view of 'Digital Security by Design Futures' 2) Conducting an innovative programme of interdisciplinary research to improve our understanding of the barriers and incentives around adoption of new secure architectures, business readiness levels and adoption, regulatory opportunities and challenges, and ways these are experienced and understood across diverse sectors; 3) Commissioning a range of agile, responsive, industry-facing projects and 'connecting capabilities' grants to address specific DSbD challenges; 4) Establishing a network of 'challenge fellows' tasked with synthesising research outcomes (core and commissioned), connecting insights to the wider Digital Security by Design initiative, and ensuring impact, alongside expert working groups comprising industry and researchers to tackle specific problems in a sharp, focussed way; and, 5) Building a community of social scientists, hardware engineers, software developers, industry and policy makers who are deeply engaged in applying a socio-technical lens to digital security by design.

DiScriBe is unique in its focus on the benefits of connecting security architecture innovation with leading social science - and will provide a step change in how cybersecurity is treated as an inter-disciplinary, social as well as technical, problem. Many of the lessons on cross disciplinary working will be tested and embedded through close working with the Bristol Digital Futures Institute - a £70m investment in how our ways of working will need to change in the digital future. We have expert challenge fellows who are leading social scientists applying their work to cybersecurity for the first time. These fellows will also lead working groups on specific topics connecting industry, policy and academia, which in turn will lead to a range of open calls for commissioned industry-facing research. This research will be both theoretically rigorous within social science, while also remaining responsive and agile enough to meet the needs of the wider DSbD programme. As a consequence, a major outcome of DiScriBE will not only be a vibrant, new community, but novel insights that can be applied to the development and implementation of new security-related developments.