The road to a PhD – No white coats, no scalpels, just a whole lot of brainpower.

As is the case with me, I did not choose the path that is easily trodden. I have launched into the ocean to explore the lands beyond. My training is as an Accountant, and my work experience is in project management, but my newfound pursuit is at the crossroads where cybersecurity and automation meet – the uncharted waters of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). My PhD research is titled “An Ontological Approach to Digital Forensic Investigations of Autonomous Vehicles.”

Quite a mouthful? I know. But I will break it down into simpler terms that could be understood. Self-driving vehicles are no longer a dream; they are here. Okay, may be not yet where you live but they are already in service in the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. While this is great news, as they stand to change our cities and lives as we know it for the better, they are also bad news. Bad news in the sense that they are fertile ground for threat actors to cause havoc. You don’t believe me?

Let’s imagine that you have used a Uber-like app to order an AV to take you from Maroko to Makoko. The AV shows up, the doors open, and you jump with excitement into the plush, comfy seats, engrossed, as usual, with your other life happenings. Multi-tasking has become a way of life for us all. Suddenly, you notice the AV picking up speed, and as the surroundings rush by, your eyes are immediately drawn to the AV’s dashboard. You could see the speed needle touching 70kmp and become alarmed. Then fright took over. It didn’t stop there and kept going up, approaching 100kph. You screamed, calling on God to save you. From Yeshua, you moved to calling the names of your dead ancestors as panic gripped you. You tried forcing the doors open, but they are locked firmly. You looked for the brake pedal of the AV but could find none.

Adrenaline started rushing unbridled, and you remember a YouTube video you had watched that advised you to look for the handbrake in circumstances like this and pull hard. You frantically looked for one, but unfortunately, none exists. Death was imminent in the next millisecond; you closed your eyes, expecting the crash that would send you to your creator. Suddenly, everything became still. Just as suddenly as the AV picked up speed, it came to a halt. It was the calm before the storm as, within seconds, there were multiple collisions at the back of the car, the force of which would have propelled you forward, except that the seat belt tightly restrained you. The airbags had deployed in multiple areas, and you were fully covered with the white powder that had escaped from the airbags. You are still in this state of confusion when a voice comes up on the speakers, “We are the Pinkie and the Brain and are just messing with you. Hope you are all right?”

Now that I have your imagination running wild, calm down. While my research will not directly prevent such an event from happening, it will aid in delivering timely and comprehensive investigation of such events were they to occur. By so doing, the outcome of the research aims to increase the chances of bad actors being caught and hence act as a deterrence in a way.

So, you’re asking, this should be a walk in the park? It is not. AVs generate a humongous amount of data, some of which it keeps and others that it overwrites. To examine these, one needs to know what to look for and where to look for it – the finding the needle in a haystack problem. It is a challenging topic, but I am standing on the shoulders of giants. I have my thesis committee’s support and experience guarding me along the way.

To give you an insight, here is my first research paper titled “Towards an Ontological Digital Forensic Investigation Framework for Autonomous Vehicles, to be delivered in Colombo, Sri Lanka at the 6th International Conference on Advancement in Computing (ICAC2024). I hope you can follow along.

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