Vadim Safronov

Dr Vadim Safronov

Research Associate

Room 470, Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD
United Kingdom

Themes:

Interests

IoT systems, IoT Security and Privacy, Wireless/wired communications, Smart environments, AI/ML for IoT

Biography

Research Associate at the University of Oxford. PhD in Computer Science, University of Cambridge.

Visiting Researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge.

My research lies at the intersection of Internet of Things (IoT) systems, cybersecurity and privacy, network architectures, wireless communications, and AI/ML applications to these areas. Over the recent years I have contributed to the following projects:

UKRI DSbD (2024-active, University of Oxford): Research on Secure Networking by Design.
EPSRC PETRAS PRISM (2023, Imperial College London): Research on privacy-preserving IoT security management. Designed an AI-based anomaly detection system running on a home router for IoT threat prevention.
Innovate UK funded Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) (West Cambridge) and Adaptive City Platform (2018-22, University of Cambridge): development of Digital Twin Model for two departmental buildings, deployment of LoRaWAN network across West Cambridge site (~185 sensors), development of complex event recognition and real-time data processing platforms;
EPSRC DADA (2018-22, University of Cambridge): exploration of smart home security threats, infrastructure development for machine learning and traffic filtering techniques towards improving smarthome security; deployment of a crowdsourcing platform for secure and anonymised user traces collection for ML model trainng;
EPSRC Databox (2018-19, University of Cambridge) : libraries/API development for system components of privacy-aware infrastructure for managing personal user application data;
SmartCity: Data negotiability in multi-mode communication networks (2019, subawarded by Human Data Interaction: Legibility, Agency, Negotiability, funded by EPSRC Network Plus): exploring MUD standard for improving IoT accountability and trust as well as ML IoT models' security.

Grants

Sep 2022 - Feb 2023: Researcher Co-Investigator of InnovateUK KTN CyberASAP grant (Imperial College London); £59k funding over 5 months, project:“IoTrim: a dynamic platform against consumer IoT privacy and security threats”.

Teaching

Network Security (2024-active): MSc Software and Systems Security, University of Oxford. Practical teaching sessions on Network Security principles in real-world contexts.
Security Principles (2024-active): MSc Software and Systems Security, University of Oxford. Practical teaching sessions on foundational security principles in real-world contexts
Computer Networking (2022-active): conducting group teaching (supervision) of Part 1B undergraduate students (University of Cambridge)
Research Skills (2022-23): supervised first-year Computer Science MPhil/PhD students in improving their research presentation skills (University of Cambridge)

Academic Service

2024-25 TPC: 26th IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM 2025);
2024-25 TPC: 4th International Workshop on Negative Results in Pervasive Computing (PerFail 2025);
2023-24 Shadow PC: 19th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys 2024).

Publications

How Memory-Safe is IoT? Assessing the Impact of Memory-Protection Solutions for Securing Wireless Gateways
V. Safronov, I. Bostan, N. Allott, A. Martin
1st International Workshop on Internet of Things for Safety-Critical Cyber Physical Systems
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on the Internet of Things (IoT 2024);

SunBlock: Cloudless Protection for IoT Systems
V. Safronov, A. M. Mandalari, D. J. Dubois, D. Choffnes, H. Haddadi
Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement (PAM 2024)

Decentralised protocol-independent automation in smart buildings
V. Safronov
PhD Dissertation
Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository (2023)

CDBB West Cambridge Digital Twin: Lessons Learned
J. Brazauskas, M. Danish, V. Safronov, R. Verma, R. Mortier, I. Lewis
arXiv (2022)

Real-Time Data Visualisation on the Adaptive City Platform
J. Brazauskas, R. Verma, V. Safronov, M. Danish, I. Lewis, R. Mortier
Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Built Environments (BuildSys 2021)

Do we want the New Old Internet? Towards Seamless and Protocol-Independent IoT Application Interoperability
V. Safronov, J. Brazauskas, M. Danish, R. Verma, I. Lewis, R. Mortier
Proceedings of the 20th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets 2021)

RACER: Real-Time Automated Complex Event Recognition in Smart Environments
R. Verma, J. Brazauskas, V. Safronov, M. Danish, I. Lewis, R. Mortier
Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (SIGSPATIAL 2021)

Revisiting IoT Device Identification
R. Kolcun, D. A. Popescu, V. Safronov, P. Yadav, A. M. Mandalari, R. Mortier, H. Haddadi
Proceedings of the 5th Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference (TMA 2021)

SenseRT: A Streaming Architecture for Smart Building Sensors
R. Verma, J. Brazauskas, V. Safronov, M. Danish, J. Merino, X. Xie, I. Lewis, R. Mortier
arXiv (2021)

Data Management for Building Information Modelling in a Real-Time Adaptive City Platform
J. Brazauskas, R. Verma, V. Safronov, M. Danish, J. Merino, X. Xie, I. Lewis, R. Mortier
arXiv (2021)

The Case for Retraining of ML Models for IoT Device Identification at the Edge
R. Kolcun, D. A. Popescu, V. Safronov, P. Yadav, A. M. Mandalari, Y. Xie, R. Mortier, H. Haddadi
arXiv(2020)

CoLearn: enabling federated learning in MUD-compliant IoT edge networks
A. Feraudo, P. Yadav, V. Safronov, D.A. Popescu, R. Mortier, S. Wang, P. Bellavista, J. Crowcroft
Proceedings of the Third ACM International Workshop on Edge Systems, Analytics and Networking (EdgeSys 2020)

Enforcing accountability in Smart built-in IoT environment using MUD
P. Yadav, V. Safronov, R. Mortier
Proceedings of the 6th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (BuildSys 2019)

"Sensing" the IoT network: Ethical capture of domestic IoT network traffic: poster abstract
D.A Popescu, V. Safronov, P. Yadav, R. Kolcun, A.M. Mandalari, H. Haddadi, D. McAuley, R. Mortier
Proceedings of the 17th Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2019)

Cut-through network switches: architecture, design and implementation
N. Zilberman, L.Dudziak, M. Jadczak, T. M. Parks, A. Rietmann, V. Safronov and D. Zuo.
University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory (2018)