The Cyber Security and Digital Forensics Laboratories simulate a professional digital forensics and cybersecurity environment. They're equipped with everything required to secure and analyse digital evidence, without leaving any trace of your analysis. Cybercrime and forensic investigations are simulated in a safe, controlled environment.
You'll access machines capable of running multiple operating systems, with root level access, on a secure closed network. You can tackle all aspects of the digital forensic process – including collection, storage, analysis and presentation of evidence. Supplementary facilities, such as evidence lockers, are also available.
Among the equipment is our autopsy table, where you can dismantle and examine computers and other devices as part of your training. High spec computers are also available to perform complex calculations required for cryptographic analysis, with the power to perform brute force work if needed.
The Digital Forensics and Cybersecurity Labs are open to all students at undergraduate and postgraduate level in the School of Computing.
Equipment
- High spec computers – hardware with the capability to simulate and perform all aspects of digital forensics and cyber security
- NUIX, XRY FTK, Cellebrite and SecurCube forensic analysis software
- Acquisition kits – featuring hardware write blockers to acquire images from hard drives, RAM and mobile phones. You can also use mobile acquisition kits.
- Device 'autopsy' table
Our facilities help graduates leave Portsmouth with the skills used by professional and academic investigators in cyber security and digital research, opening the way to careers in:
- network administration
- penetration testing (ethical hacking)
- forensic investigation
- data management
- malware and security analysis
- data management
Cyber Security and Digital Forensics Laboratories
Get to grips with hacking techniques, and methods to trace and combat them, in our Cyber Security and Forensic Security Laboratories.
This is one of our cyber security and forensic computing laboratories. The sort of stuff that we do here, we really hope is going to interest you if you're interested in the cyber security and forensic computing degree programme or if you're interested in ensuring that you're developing something in a secure manner.
As an option for almost all of our degree programmes is our ethical hacking module in the second year. You can access these machines that are very high powered machines so if you want to do some brute force then you can. You can test out some tools that we've got available for you to use in order to try and exploit some vulnerabilities that exist in systems. Then for those of you who are then going to move on and develop this further in the third year, you'll meet me, and my interest in identification of new vulnerabilities and how to exploit new vulnerabilities.
The other thing that you'll do in a lab like this is actually the other side of cybersecurity, which is a forensic side. So the sort of thing that happens after an incident has occurred. You're using forensic tools, you're imaging hard drives, you're extracting items of interest, digital items of evidence that helps you to tell a story about what has happened before and during this possible cybersecurity incident.
We actually have a student who's developed to tryhackme website. He's got over 300,000 registered users. It's a great way of having lots and lots of different tries, lots of different tools, lots of different examples of how to exploit vulnerabilities and how to identify those vulnerabilities being exploited.
Where to find us
Cyber Security Laboratory
Room 0.34, Portland Building,Portsmouth,
PO1 3AH
Digital Forensics Laboratory
Room 0.07, Lion Gate Building,Portsmouth,
PO1 3HE