On the 1st December, the annual Cybersecurity Research Conference Ireland 2025 took place at University of Galway bringing together researchers from academia, industry and public authorities in the field of cybersecurity across the island of Ireland.
A dedicated industry R&D session was organised by Cyber Ireland, in partnership with itag and University of Galway, on “Developing Ireland’s Cybersecurity Industry through Research and Development”.
Industry R&D Session Agenda:
- Keynote: Prof. Donna O’Shea Talk: Collaborating for enhanced cyber resilience in a rapidly evolving landscape
- Industry Research Papers:
- Late Binding ROM: Flexible, In-Field Updateable Post Quantum Cryptography in Hardware, Intel.
- Comparison of Graph-Based Filtering Mechanisms for LLM Data Leak Prevention, Dell.
- Panel Discussion on “Research to Reality: From Knowledge to Impact in Ireland’s Cybersecurity Sector”:
- Moderator: Michael Schukat, University of Galway
- Ihsan Ullah, Assistant Professor, School of Computer Science, University of Galway
- Prof Donna O’Shea, Chair of Digital Engineering, University of Limerick.
- Jennifer Cox, Director, Solutions Engineering, Tines
- John Barry, Security Architect, Intel Ireland
The purpose of the industry R&D session was to facilitate new, collaborative industry-academia cybersecurity R&D projects. How we aim to achieve this is through:
- Bringing university researchers together with industry to make connections.
- Promoting the industry-focused R&D projections in cybersecurity as case studies to learn from.
- Demonstrating how industry can engage with universities for R&D, the capabilities availability, funding streams and benefits of developing a collaborative R&D projects.
Why Collaborative Industry R&D is Important
The benefits of collaborative R&D are clear:
- it shares research costs and risks,
- it provides access to specialist cybersecurity knowledge and expertise, and
- it accelerates innovation and time to market.
Our goal in Cyber Ireland is to realise Ireland’s cybersecurity sector opportunity and to position Ireland as the leading cyber industry in Europe. To do so, we need a strong cybersecurity R&D ecosystem of research capabilities and critical mass in academia, and a willing industry conducting R&D here.
When we were setting up Cyber Ireland in 2019, we travelled around the country running workshops in Cork, Dublin and Galway with people from industry, academia and government to understand what were the needs and challenges of the cybersecurity sector. One key theme was the need for a national cybersecurity research centre, to act as a coordinator and build capabilities for both academic and industry R&D projects in cybersecurity.
We have been campaigning for this centre for the past 6 years, and at the beginning of 2025, it was included in the programme for government that a cybersecurity research centre would be delivered by the government. More recently, the National Cyber Security Centre, has received budget allocation and is commencing the process of developing the centre.
This National Cybersecurity R&D Centre has the potential to be a centre of gravity for cybersecurity in Ireland:
- Conducting academic research and coordinate existing cybersecurity research capabilities across the country.
- Engaging government departments and agencies (NCSC, Gards, Defence Forces),
- It should provide advanced training with PhDs and post-docs,
- It should be future focused looking at the technological and societal needs into the future.
- Critically it must be enterprise-focused, taking research needs from industry, and providing the capabilities to deliver industry R&D projects. It should support not just large companies and MNCs, but support innovation in Irish start-ups and SMEs.
Such a centre will enable us to compete with leading cybersecurity research centres like CSIT in Queen’s University Belfast. We are looking forward to contributing to the development of Ireland’s National Cybersecurity R&D Centre and realising the opportunity to accelerate Ireland’s cybersecurity industry development.
