Bill Buchanan (computer scientist)

He has also expressed strong viewpoints on the lack of digital trust on the Internet, and in the need to integrate cryptography into future systems. On joining the IOTA Research Council in 2018,[31] he outlined that, "I believe that we live in a digital world that was created in the 20th Century. We thus need to build a more trusted world, and put the rights of the citizen at the centre of this world. This new world will respect privacy, consent and ownership, and we should be able to trust every single transaction",[32] and also looked to the future in that, "We are now in a phase of rapid rebuilding, and very few areas of our lives will remain untouched. I think this will be one of the most significant eras in the whole of human existence, and will be a time that builds the foundations of our future. Being involved in a research council leadership role in IOTA will provide me with the opportunity to inform the future, making decisions which will help build a solid foundation for our next generation".[32]

In a podcast in 2022,[33] Buchanan outlined the importance building a soild foundation of the Internet with, "The future of the Internet is to build on a foundation of mathematics. We've built the Internet on sand." In 2023, on joining a Zero Trust Special Interest Group,[34] it is outlined that Buchanan is, "a firm believer in fairness, justice, and freedom. He has a deep passion for everything related to cryptography, digital trust and digital identity, and in building a more trusted, secure and resilient digital world, and with a focus on the rights of citizens to privacy".[35]

Buchanan's involvement in the EU funded GLASS[36] and TRUSTEE[37] projects have provided a recent avenue for the development of the enhanced rights of citizen the sharing of data.

His viewpoints on the poor state of the digital integration of citizens have been clear over the years, and he has made many statements related to this, including, "The NHS, itself, has tried to transform itself in the past, but the results have often been poor, and it still struggles with integrating the citizen in a meaningful digital way. While always leading clinically, the NHS has never really produced true leaders in digitization, and still sees the digital integration of the citizen as a bridge too far. Apart from the disastrous Connecting For Health programme, there has never really been a core opportunity to build the digital integration of the citizen at scale, or, probably more important, the incentive for the citizen to actually engage with the digitization programme."[38]

Buchanan has also outlined the ack of a strong digital foundation within the NHS in UK, "And, so, recently, I went to register for a GP and was handed a piece of paper and told to find a pen and write down all my details. In virtually every interaction with the NHS, I have had to do this, and perhaps, one day, I will have all my medical details stored on a digital wallet on my phone, and where the GP just scans them in. Once I filled in it, it then went into a black hole — and where I hoped that a human would eventually make sense of my scribbles."[39] This, he outlines, is a lack of a plan for a data architecture and citizen identity, "There’s no vision, no blueprint, no Estonian X-Road, no Finnish engagement plan, and no debate or critical analysis. Without any real digital identity system, we build on sand."[40]

Buchanan has expressed strong viewpoints on the move from existing public key methods towards PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography) techniques, and outlines, "And, so, we are moving into one of the greatest changes that we ever see on the Internet, and where we will translate from our existing public key infrastructures towards Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) methods.",[41] along with outlining the advantages of using Quantum Computers, "For the first time, we will be able to compute with light particles and move away from our traditional Von Neumann architecture. In a decade or so, perhaps, our silicon-based chips will feel like the vacuum tubes of the past — clunky, inefficient, and slow. And, the whole concept of pushing electrons down npn transistor junctions for computation may feel like we are racing on a skateboard against a Jumbo Jet at top speed."[42] and "We have a problem in cybersecurity… and it’s a big problem. Everything that uses our public key methods, needs to be removed within an era of quantum computers. This includes checking the identity of the server that you are connecting to, and in the proof of your identity within online systems. The digital signatures that we produce for cryptocurrencies will also break. So we must start to migrate our systems over the next few years, and create as little disruption as possible."[43]

Buchanan is documented as a passioniate believer in the power of cryptography in building a more trusted digital world, "I believe that we live in a digital world that was created in the 20th Century. We thus need to build a more trusted world, and put the rights of the citizen at the centre of this world. This new world will respect privacy, consent and ownership, and we should be able to trust every single transaction."[6]

In Nov 2014, on the debate around the Investigatory Powers Bill, he outlined the tensions between the rights to privacy and the rights of society to protect itself with, "This tension between law enforcement and the right to privacy remains unresolved. The FBI currently see the status quo, where major tech companies are persuaded or brow-beaten into cooperating with police and security agencies under the PATRIOT Act, as necessary to pursue criminals and terrorists. In the UK the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA) defines what information of citizens that law enforcement can access, with the support of a warrant."[44]

On 21 Dec 2015, Buchanan gave evidence for the Investigatory Powers Bill debate in the House of Commons, at which he outlined, "I would say that we live in a very different world from the one that we did. We have built this cyberage within about 40 years, but the infrastructure that we have created is very fragile. We must protect citizens from hackers and so on. We must protect privacy and identity. More and more services are moving towards the provision of both privacy and identity. Individuals need to be assured that they are not being spied on by cybercriminals across the world. They also need to be able to prove their own identity and the identity of what they are connecting to."[45][46] In July 2023, he was one of the 68 signatories on an open letter related to the UK's Online Safety Bill.[47]

In Sept 2023, Buchanan reached 2,000 articles on Medium.com related to areas of cybersecurity and cryptography.[48]

Buchanan leads the Blockpass ID Lab (BIL) and which was initially co-funded by Blockpass IDN and Edinburgh Napier University. It is located on the Merchiston Campus and was launched on 26 September 2018.[69] Overall, it was the first research lab in the World to focus on digital identity, and hosts research work in areas on blockchain, digital identity, privacy preserving methods and applied cryptography, with key focus areas of around citizen focused data sharing. The lab has also hosted a number of related research grants, including GLASS[70] and TRUSTEE,[71] along with incubating the True Deploy future spin-out. BIL has generated a wide range of research outputs over the years, including for Threat Intelligence Sharing,[72] Vaccination Certificates and Passports,[73][74] Privacy-preserving passive DNS,[75] and Combat fake content detection.[76]

In April 2020, Chaloner Chute[77] at the DHI defined a research brief for a team of experts from Edinburgh Napier University (Buchanan), the University of Glasgow (Professor Muhammad Imran[78] and Professor Jill Pell[79]), the University of Edinburgh (Dr Claudia Pagliari[80]) and the University of Strathclyde (Dr Sanna Rimpiläinen[81]). This brief involved a review of the usage of contact tracing applications. Buchanan focused on answering the question, "How might the distributed system be architected to be secure and respectful of privacy from the outset?". Overall, each of the experts then reviewed key areas around the usage of contract tracing, and submitted a compiled report answering the key questions, and published as, "Use Of Participatory Apps In Contact Tracing: Options And Implications for Public Health, Privacy and Trust."[82] This advised that the UK-proposed method of track and trace had weaknesses, and that Scotland should take an alternative approach.

Buchanan also applied his applied cryptography knowledge to areas of COVID-19 track and trace methods. This included collaborated work with the University of Glasgow on a blockchain-based methods named BeepTrace.[83] Buchanan also worked with teams on privacy-aware COVID-19 passports using the Ethereum platform,[74] reviewed the state-of-the-art in privacy-aware applications for track and trace,[84] implemented privacy aware identity matching.[85]

Within the Blockpass ID Lab, Buchanan has worked with Dr Nick Pitropakis[86] in the supervision of a PhD students working on permissioned blockchains, such as those related to Hyperledger Fabric. These types of blockchains integrated well with Buchanan's focus on privacy-aware systems and which are citizen focused. With Dr Pavlos Papadopoulos[87] the focus was on privacy-aware systems in areas of DNS and health care:, such as for, " A privacy-preserving healthcare framework using hyperledger fabric",[88] and "Privacy-preserving passive dns".[75]

In the PhD supervision of Dr Will Abramson,[89] the focus was on the self-soveign identity systems using Hyperledger and in data sharing, "PyDentity: A playground for education and experimentation with the Hyperledger verifiable information exchange platform".[90] Buchanan advanced work with Hyperledger Fabric within the CyberHunt research project,[91] and worked with Hisham Ali and Dr Jawad Ahmad on new ways of trusted threat sharing in cybersecurity with a "Trusted Threat Intelligence Sharing in Practice and Performance Benchmarking through the Hyperledger Fabric Platform"[72] and "Privacy-preserving and Trusted Threat Intelligence Sharing using Distributed Ledgers".[92]

In 2017, Buchanan worked with Dr Grzegorz Spyra and Dr Elias Ekonomou on the defining of sticky policies for OOXML (Office Open XML). This used an Identity Based Encryption (IBE) primitive to securely bind an access policy and the document data together. Buchanan also worked on the digital investigations for blockchain-based transactions, including for bitcoin mixing[93] and the investigation of ERC20 tokens.[94] Within work on quantum robust blockchains, Buchanan worked with an international team on quantum robust blockchains,[95] and which uses lattice-based cryptography with polynomials for IBE and aggregate signatures for a consensus. Buchanan worked with Mwarwan Abubakaron areas of blockchain based architectures for IoT[96] and for vaccination certificates.[97]

From 2017, Buchanan has worked in the area of post quantum cryptography (PQC) and published a paper entitled, "Will quantum computers be the end of public key encryption?"[98] with Professor Alan Woodward[99] from the University of Surrey. Recent work has included an analysis of the performance of the TLS protocol using Post Quantum Cryptography[100] and in the application of quantum computing methods to Botnet Detection. New work involves applying quantum computing methods into cybersecurity applications, including using, "a hybrid machine learning methods on real quantum computers, with 100 data samples, and also with real-device-based simulations, with 5,000 data samples. It uses HQML (Hybrid Quantum Machine Learning) algorithms applied to the detection of botnet-generated domain names. This includes the features of the character length of the domain, the entropy of the domain name, and the reputation of the domain name."[101]

Buchanan work on digital forensics has includes the analysis of IoT forensics on devices,[102] in the forensics artefacts left by the Tor browser[103] and for the digital forensics within the IMO call and chat app.[104]

Buchanan's research work in cryptography and encryption involves its integration into blockchain methods, post quantum cryptography, light-weight cryptography, end-to-end encryption and fundamentals areas around stream ciphers, chaos theory, random number generators and image-based encryption. Buchanan worked with Scott Helme on samplying the Top 500 Websites within Alexa Top 1 Million sites for industry sectors related to HTTP responses and in the usage of the Content-Security-Policy (CSP).[105] Other related papers focus on improvements to cryptography within telecommunication components for end-to-end data encryption,[106] enhancements to the RC4 stream cipher using a symmetric random function generator,[107] and in the creation of a secure random number generator with immuity and propagation characteristics.[108]

For privacy-aware COVID-19 tracing, Buchanan collaborated on work related to the usage of privacy-aware blockchain methods and applied cryptography.[83][74][109] His work, too, has involved the creation of new methods to detect ransomware. This has included the discovery of encryption keys in memory,[110] and in the usage of entropy detection methods.[111]

Buchanan works with Dr Jawad Ahmad[112] on a range of chaos-based work, and which supports a high degree of randomization from a small perturbance, including one of the first papers to outline the usage of chaos based methods applied to zero knowledge proofs.[113] This paper outlines the concept of using port knocking to secure services, and where cryptographic hashes are through a chaotic process. Along with this, a key area of collaboration involves the encryption of digital images using chaos-based methods, such as with the Mersenne twister random number generator method with DNA genetic encoding,[10][114] using chaos-based confusion and diffusion of image pixels using dynamic substitution,[115] a multi-chaos based compressive sensing encryption technique,[116] a multistage encryption scheme using linear feedback register and chaos-based quantum map,[117] and using a convolutional autoencoder within chaos-based encryption.[118]

In 2017, Buchanan worked with Dr Shancang Li[119] and Dr Rameez Asif[120] on a review of light-weight encryption methods for limited capability devices.[121] Then, in 2019, he was joined by Dr Nilupulee Gunathilake and Asif to define key elements on the implementation, challenges and applications of light-weight cryptography for IoT devices[122] and, in 2020, for recent advances related to IoT security.[123] Buchanan's work has also included the breaking of light-weight cryptography methods through the capture for radio emissions from a device using the PRESENT encryption method.[124]

Buchanan was the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Edinburgh Napier University work within the EPSRC/TSB (Technology Strategy Board)-funded DACAR project, and which focused on citizen rights to share data within heath care.[146] It ran from November 2009 until November 2011 and involved a collaboration between CipherLab, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital,[147] GS1 UK,[148] Imperial College London, and Kodit. A core contribution of the project was the creation of the SPoC[149] (Single Point of Contact) approach to information sharing, and the integration of identity, role and access rights to every part of the capture, storage and consumption of health care data. Its integration within Chelsea and Westminster Hospital was led by Professor Derek Bell.[150]

The project was the first time that Buchanan formally worked with Professor Christoph Thummler,[151] and who, at the time, had a post as a clinician at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and at Edinburgh Napier University.[152] The core research team also involved Dr Owen Lo and Dr Lu Fan.[153] The integration of GS1 UK allowed the integration of emerging RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) standards[154][155] into the identification of medical artifacts, including tracking beds and medical equipment around the hospital.

After this project, Dr Owen Lo continued to work with Buchanan on a number of research projects, and was a co-inventor within the Cyan Forensics spin-out company[156] and which changed its name to Cyacomb.[157]

From March 2011 to July 2013, Buchanan continued to partner with Professor Christoph Thummler, Dr Owen Lo and Dr Lu Fan, and was the Principal Investigator (PI) on the ESPRC-funded, "Scalable and Open Framework for Human/Digital Trust between Informal/Formal Personal Health Care Infrastructures"[158] project. This extended the work from the DACAR project but focused on assisted living, and involved a collaboration with Microsoft and HoIP (Health Over IP). While DACAR had focused on the sharing of health care information around hospitial data, this project extented the core concepts to create a novel governance policy infrastructure using a circle-of-trust relationship for assisted living. This linked to formal, role-based security for primary and secondary health care. New work also included the integration of the SPoC approach with the Microsoft Health Vault.[159]

At the time, the work was known as Cloud4Health,[160] and Buchanan gave an overview of the approach in a submission for a Scotland IS award in May 2012.[161] Overall, the work in this project and DACAR laid the technical foundation for the Symphonic spin-out company from Edinburgh Napier University in 2013. It also the main focuse for the 4* rated - quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour - impact case study for UoA 11 in REF 2021 entitled, "Enabling Sensitive Personal Data to be Shared with Trust using Novel Digital Security Methods".[52]

Buchanan is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the Edinburgh Napier University work[162] within the EU Horizon funded GLASS project,[163] and which is a new paradigm for sharing or transfer of personal information with the citizen in control. It started in January 2021 and completed in December 2023 (Grant agreement No 959879).[164] The research project includes collaborators from TAGES (Teknoloji Arastirma ve Gelistirme Endustriyel Urunler Bilisim Teknolojileri San. ve Tic. A.S.), Fraunhofer FOKUS, UBITECH Limited, University of Patras, Suite 5, Hellenic Ministry of Digital Governance, and Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. This has built a citizen focused digital wallet and new models data sharing[165] using Hyperledger Fabric and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System). In 2022, the GLASS project received "Leading Light Innovation" award at the Scottish Cybersecurity Awards.[166]

Buchanan has innovated the vSoC teaching and training environment within Edinburgh Napier University, and which is used by students within the cybersecurity and networking-related subjects. The work started within a grant funded by DG Home[167] related to the "Prevention Of and Fight against Crime" theme and was entitled, "DFET (Digital Forensics Evaluation and Training)".[168][169] It was led by Buchanan, and included collaborators of Stefan Institute (JSI), Stockholm University, Police Scotland, and Aconite Internet Solutions. This provided the basic cloud infrastructure for the environment and used a VMWare vSphere virtualised environment that was hosted within the Merchiston Campus at Edinburgh Napier University.

From December 2015 to February 2017, the Advanced HE advanced the work by funding a project entitled, "vSOC - Virtualised Security Operations Centre",[170] and which scaled vSoC into cybersecurity areas. The work continued with the funding of a KTP (Knowledge Transfer Partnership) from Innovate UK and Satisnet Limited and which integrated SIEM tools into the environment.[171] From June 2019 to May 2020, The Data Lab[172] funded integrated of data science and cybersecurity.[173] In Sept 2023, the vSoC infrastructure was short-listed for "Technological or Digital Innovation of the Year" at the Times Higher Education awards 2023.[174]

Buchanan's work with Dr Owen Lo[175] and Dr Nilupulee Gunathilake[176] has included an analysis of side channel attacks on the cryptography running on embedded devices using electrical noise generation and radio emissions. From Jan 2017 to Jan 2017, Buchanan and Owen Lo worked with Keysight on research related to "Bare Metal Forensics - Pattern Analysis Heuristics - Data Analysis", and co-funded by The Data Lab.[177] This resulted in a paper entitled, "Power analysis attacks on the AES-128 S-box using differential power analysis (DPA) and correlation power analysis (CPA)"[178] and which cracked 128-bit AES encryption on an Arduino Uno from the electrical noise generated from the device. Douglas Carson from Keysight and Lo presented the work live on 21 September 2016 at an event in Edinburgh.[179][180]

From Nov 2016 to Oct 2017, work continued with the support of CENSIS, and which analysed IoT Bluetooth threats related to health care devices in a research project entitled "IoT Hardware Security Test Framework".[181] For this, in Sept 2018, Buchanan defined, “The biggest thing holding back the development of the IoT is security – specifically, concerns about the vulnerabilities of devices, the ease of hacking them, and the consequences of such hacks. In health care, for example, IoT could transform the way we monitor health and manage conditions like asthma. Only if we can improve confidence in IoT security can we realise the potential of smart technology."[182]

Lo, Buchanan and Carson also managed to break the PRESENT block cipher on an embedded device using CPA (Correlation Power Analysis) and electrical noise generation.[183] Gunathilake has since advanced the work in the analysis of radio emission from devices, including the cracking of the PRESENT light-weight encryption method.[184]

Dr Gordon Russell, Dr Thomas Tan and Buchanan were part of Peter McLaren's PhD supervision, and which resulted in a thesis entitled, "Investigations into decrypting live secure traffic in virtual environments".[185] Buchanan then was the Principal Investigator (PI) for the "MemCrypt" research project and which was funded from Sept 2020 to March 2021 by Scottish Enterrprise within its High Growth Spin-out Programme.[186] Dr Owen Lo and McLaren then developed the work on the detection of encryption keys in memory, and scaled it to work with the detection of a range of ransomware families. From April 2020 to July 2020, Buchanan led an Innovate UK CyberASAP[187] grant,[188] and which continued to a second phase from Sept 2020 to Feb 2021.[189] This resulted in a spin-out company in January 2021 with Peter Jaco as CEO, and Peter Mclaren at CTO.[190]

Significant research outputs from research work includes the mining malware command and control traces,[191] the finding ChaCha20 key streams from targeted memory analysis,[192] a patent in the detection of ransomware",[67] the evaluation of live forensic techniques in ransomware attack mitigation.[193] Recent work includes the usage of entropy techniques to detect the presence of ransomware keys and files, including with a differential area analysis fmethod,[194] and in the evaluation of a range of entropy detection methods to discover encrypted content.[111]

Over 2003/2004, Buchanan worked with Cànan Ltd - who are based at Sabhal Mor Ostaig in Sleat on the Isle of Skye - on a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project to advance Gaelic language learning. This support aimed to scale-up of Cànan's print-based content into a multimedia delivery. The KTP Associate was Evan Brown, and his academic supervisor was Buchanan.

The KTP gained a Grade 1 Certificate of Excellence from Innovate UK, and won the KTP Award Winning Partnership of the year in 2004.[195] At the time, Donella Beaton, Ceannard/Chief Executive, Cànan Ltd, outlined, “The KTP programme brought knowledge, partnerships, confidence, publicity, quality staff and a can-do attitude. The grant allowed these aspects to develop, but the results were much greater than a pure financial investment. I would thoroughly endorse the Knowledge Transfer Programme to any organisation who knows what they would like to achieve, but doesn't know how to go about it." Donella Beaton went on to become the Vice Principal for Economic Development at Robert Gordon's University.[196]

The KTP resulted in BubbleSpeak, an innovative templatebased content system that is simple to use, portable and platform independent. Cànan gained a culture of innovation and access to new technologies, which raised its profile, generated a new lucrative market and embedded a practice of research and development. Buchanan, defined that, "Big companies can afford to have research and development departments but small and medium operations do not have the resources. The companies need the Associates because they do not have the skills inhouse or the access to equipment which we can provide." The success of the KTP allowed Buchanan to develop his own research group named "Distributed Systems and Mobile Agents" (DSMA) within the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University.[197]

The work of Dr Jamie Graves[225] and Buchanan on a PhD project ("Forensic verification of operating system activity via novel data, acquisition and analysis techniques"[226][227]) led to the incorporation of Inquisitive Systems Limited in 2008.[228] This led to the submission of patents entitled "Improvements in or relating to digital forensics" and "Digital Forensics" in Oct 2008,[229] and Sept 2009,[230] respectively. The "Improvements in or relating to digital forensics" was published for world-wide status in March 2010,[231] and granted in the EU[232] in May 2019. The "Digital Forensics" patent was granted on Nov 2014 for the US.[62]

The patents captured the core research:[233] defining activity footprints as a 'digital DNA' sequence, which can be used with a new matching algorithm (BLAST DNA) to determine the probability of a sequence match to a malicious event, significantly outperforming existing signature-based methods. This proved particularly useful in detecting insider threats such as copying source-code to a USB device. The original patent owner was Edinburgh Napier University, and where the existing EU patent is owned by Fortinet Inc.[232]

After funding from Scottish Enterprise in the Proof of Concept programme[234] from September 2008 to August 2010, the research work was spun-out from Edinburgh Napier University in September 2010, and where Graves was the CEO, and who continued in this post until Zonefox was acquired by Fortinet Inc. The company, in 2013, changed its trading name to Zonefox. On 23 October 2018, Fortinet Inc announced that it had fully acquired Zonefox[235] and that Zonefox's product range would be integrated into the Fortinet Security Fabric offering. Edinburgh Napier University was one of the significant shareholders in the acquisition, along with the co-inventors.

Graves returned to Edinburgh Napier University in Feb 2021 to take up a post "Entrepreneur in Residence" with a Royal Society-funded grant.[236]

For over a decade, Buchanan has run research work related to sharing and integrating the rights of the citizen. It addresses gaps around data governance related to ownership rights, governance, and privacy through the creation of a framework that set out new processes relating to citizen-defined access policies.[237] A major output of the work was the Symphonic Trust spin-out, and which was acquired by Ping Identity in 2020.[238]

The research began in 2008 with a collaboration with Police Scotland, looking at weaknesses around information sharing within law enforcement,[239] and in developed new ways to integrate large-scale integration of rights across interconnected domains. It resulted in the submission of a patent for the US in January 2013,[240] for the World in Jun 2014.[241] The US patent was granted in July 2014.[241]

Other related research led by Buchanan was funded within two EPSRC/Innovate UK funded projects: "Data Capture and Auto Identification Reference" [242](DACAR)[243] and "Scalable and Open Framework for Human/Digital Trust between Informal/Formal Personal Health Care Infrastructures".[244] This work was then further developed by introducing the concept of data-buckets owned by the citizen, and in the concept of using a SPoC (Single Point of Contact) for sharing information between interconnected domains.[245]

From March 2012 to October 2013, the work was in a project entitled, "sa.FIRE" (Secure Analysis and FIltering Risk Engine)[246] and funded from Scottish Enterprise on their HGSP programme, and where Derick James,[247] Richard Lewis (as a Commercial Champion) and Niall Burns[248] came on board. The company spun out of Edinburgh Napier University in 2014, and received initial investment from Par Equity.[249] Derick James became the CEO and Niall Burns was the CTO. The company eventually dropped the "Trust" part of its name and just traded as Symphonic. On 2 November 2020, it announced that Symphonic had been acquired by Ping Identity[250] for $32 million.[251] Edinburgh Napier University was one of the significant shareholders in the acquisition, along with the co-inventors (Buchanan, Dr Lu Fan, Alistair Lawson and Dr Omair Uthmani).

From 2014 to 2017, Buchanan and Rich Macfarlane[252] supervised Dr Phil Penrose for a PhD. The work was submitted in 2017, and entitled "Forensic analysis of large capacity digital storage devices".[253] This core work led to a UK patent application entitled, "Method for identification of digital content" in April 2017.[254] The UK patent was granted in the UK in June 2021, and published as a World patent in October 2018,[66] an EU patent in February 2020,[255] a Canadian patent in October 2018,[256] and a US patent in September 2021.[257]

From March 2015 to January 2016, the work was funded by Scottish Enterprise as part of a Proof of Concept grant.[258] In Jne 2016, Cyan Forensics was first incorporated,[259] and became a spin-out from Edinburgh Napier University. The CEO was Ian Stevenson and the CTO was Bruce Ramsay.[260] The co-inventors of the core technology for the spin-out were Buchanan, Dr Phil Penrose, Rich Macfarlane, Bruce Ramsay and Dr Owen Lo.

In March 2022, Cyan Forensics changed their trading name to Cyacomb.[261] In 2022, Cyacomb were awarded with a Technology Pioneer by World Economic Forum,[262] and an innovation award winner at the GovTech Summit in 2019.[263] The company also received a Cybersecurity award in the same year for "Best Cyber Breakthrough" in 2019 at the Scottish Cyber Awards.[264]

Par Equity led a £5 million Series A funding round in March 2021.[265]

In 2022, Ian Stevenson, the CEO of Cyacomb, wrote an open letter to the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture Media and Sport related to the uses of encrypted messaging in the UK with the comment of "To pass the Online Safety Bill in a form that does not allow for the possibility of secure, privacy protecting CSAM detection solutions now or in the future would be to miss a crucial opportunity to do enormous good".[266] In October 2023, Cyacomb received Digital received investment of £3.8million from the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB), Par Equity, Mercia Ventures, Scottish Enterprise and private investors, with Jane Reoch, Executive Director at SNIB outining that, "Cyacomb is at the forefront of tech development in Scotland. They perfectly align with our mission to harness innovation."[267]

Buchanan supported the creation of the MemCrypt spin-out, and which focuses on the discovery of cryptographic keys in memory (based on the PhD work of Dr Peter McLaren[268]). The team then progressed this work by including triage methods into the discovery of encryption keys within memory.[269][270] Key contributions include being the first to detect the presence of ChaCha20 encryption keys in running memory (one of the most popular encryption methods used in secure communications), and identifying a major vulnerability within tools such as OpenSSL.[271]

The work has since been applied to ransomware detection and recovery.[272] From September 2020 until March 2021, the work received funding from Scottish Enterprise as part of their HGSP grant awards,[145] and, from September 2020 until Feb 2021 from the Innovate UK Cyber ASAP programme.[273] MemCrypt Limited spun out of Edinburgh Napier University in Oct 2020[274] and incorporated in Jun 2021.[275] In November 2021, the research work related to MemCrypt received a Leading Light Innovation award at the Scottish Cybersecurity awards.[276]

Buchanan writes on areas of cryptography, cybersecurity and computer science within the blog entiled "ASecuritySite: When Bob Met Alice" [282] and has a YouTube channel containing a range of lectures, tutorials and demonstrations,[283] along with related Apple,[284] Spotify[285] and Audible[286] podcasts.

Over the years, Buchanan has shown a particular passion for education and knowledge exchange, "We live on a small planet, but education and research binds people together with a common drive to improve things. People with talent can achieve their full potential, and education opens up so many doors that many close. It gives people the confidence to take ownership of their lives."[287] and on continually learning throughout our lives, "You should never sit back on what you currently know, and you force yourself into new areas. At times, especially when there is virtually no knowledge around, you feel like you are free falling, but you catch yourself and find yourself leading rather than following."[287]

Buchanan has received a number of teaching-related awards, including, in 2014, winning the ENSA[288] Student-voted Excellence Awards award for "Most Innovative Tutor."[289] He also won the Best Lecturer/Tutor for Computing in the ENSA Student-voted Excellence Awards in the School of Computing for 2011, 2014, 2015,[290] 2019,[291] 2020[292] and 2023.[293]

In 2016, Buchanan was awarded with the "Cyber Evangelist of the Year" at the first Scottish Cybersecurity awards.[294] At these awards, his previous PhD student - Dr Jamie Graves - received a "Champion of Champions" award for his work in advancing Zonefox.[295]

In Sept 2023, Buchanan was short-listed for "Most Innovative Teacher of the Year" at the Times Higher Education awards 2023.[174]

Buchanan created the MSc in Advanced Security and Digital Forensics in the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University in 2010, and which now integrates students from around the world.[296] It was the first MSc course in the UK to receive full NCSC certification. A core part of the support for distance students has been built around the vSoC teaching infrastructure. Buchanan also created the BEng (Hons) in Cybersecurity and Forensics in the School of Computing, and which was awarded full NCSC accreditation in 2018.[297]

In November 2019, Rich Macfarlane - the programme leader for the MSc in the Advanced Security and Digital Forensics programme - picked up the award for "Best Cyber Education Programme" in the Scottish Cyber Awards.[298]

In August 2023, the School of Computing was awarded a Gold award status for its ACE-CSE (Academic Centre of Excellence - Cyber Security Education). Buchanan and Macfarlane are co-directors of the ACE-CSE, where Buchanan is responsible for areas of innovation, research and enterprise and outlined, "We have increasingly strived to integrate our research in order to improve our teaching, and enterprise and innovation are core pillars of this."[299]

Bright Red Publishing[300] is an Edinburgh-based book publisher that focus on textbooks for schools related to N5, Higher and Advanced Higher topics. The first phase of the first between a collaboration between Bright Red Publishing and Buchanan ran from July 2012 to Dec 2012, and was funded by Interface Online.[301][302] This created the Digital Zone[303] and which was an innovative method of converting electronic version of the books into an online format, while provided a novel range of Mathematics and Physics abstactions, such as for formula translation and solution checkers. It was coded in C# and uses a Microsoft ASP.NET infrastructure. The second phase of the collaboration focused on "Innovation and Integrated Learning Environment for Engaging and Ever-changing Educational Content".[304] It involved using Buchanan developing a dynamic challenges in the generation for test questions. This allowed for template questions, and which could be used to generate ever-changing questions. Buchanan and Bright Red Publishing have continued to collaborate, and with 26 N5 books,[305] 20 Higher books,[306] and eight Advanced Higher Books. All of the code produced for the Digital Zone was written by Buchanan.

Data plays an ever-increasing role in cybersecurity - whether it is to protect against attackers or in investigating incidents. There is thus an increasing requirement to gather data within organisations, and also to detect threats through open source intelligence. Cybersecurity professionals are thus increasingly required to understand complex data sets and make sense of them. This might be to detect standard attack mechanisms or find 'a need-in-a-haystack'. Buchanan saw the potential of bringing together academic content and practical challenges which fused data science with cybersecurity, and, so, in 2019, The Data Lab[307] co-funded the development of on-line training material, and named it "Cyber&Data".[308]

The Cyber&Data programme aims to bring together the cybersecurity and data science disciplines, and thus to understand how to best gather, analyse and report on cybersecurity-related data. At its core is the conversion of data from many different sources and in many different formats into useful infrastructure, and to provide a solid foundation in the core data sources. In order to give hands-on experience, the Cyber&Data programme uses widely used tools, such as Wireshark[309] (for deep network packet analysis) and Snort[310] (for IDS - Intrusion Detection System).

Buchanan released the content in August 2020, and included five main units of Fundamentals, Data Capture and Analysis, Data Science and Cyber, Data Applications and Machine Learning, and Cyber Applications. A key element of the work is the integration of Splunk[311] analytics, and which is a tool often used by SOC (Security Operations Centre) Analysts. As part of this, Buchanan used the Buttercup games scenario[312] to provide practical hands-on experience in using SPL[313] (Search Processing Language) for the analysis of cybersecurity data from system logs.[314] The content is used within a number of modules within the School of Computing, Engineering and the Build Environment at Edinburgh Napier University, and is freely available to others. Buchanan has been quoted with, "As much as possible, education should be free to access".[315]

Since Feb 2013,[316] Buchanan has worked on a range of on-line cipher challenges, and which are free to access and use.[317] The currently supported ciphers within the online challenge include:

• Graphics-based ciphers: Pigpen, semaphore, Templar, Mary's, Dscript, Voynich, three-square cipher, Monk, and Morse.
• Substitution code ciphers: ASCII codes, gold bug, Bacon, Dvorak, Atbash, Rot13, ROT47, tap, Baudot, scrambled, homomorphic, Caeser, gray code, Pollux, Fractional, Greek alphabet, Runic, encode, and Navajo.
• Grid ciphers: ADFGVX, Polybius, Bifid, Straddling, column, SYLLABARY, Porta, columnar transposition, Beaufot, S-box mapping, Delastelle, and Nilist.
• Key-based ciphers: keyword, OTP, Condi, AMSCO, Vigenère, and Beale.
• Maths/arithmetic-based cipher: exponential cipher, Diffie-Hellman, multiplication, LZ coding, Huffman, jump, Affine, XOR, GCD (Great Common Divisor), binary multiplication (modulo 2), binary divide (modulo 2), and RSA.
• Puzzle-based cipher: Sudoku, 3-rail, and NULL.

Along with this, Buchanan developed a range of cipher coders and decoders,[318] and which include the Barbie cipher, Rick Astley, Scytale cipher, Lorem Ipsum Cipher, Delastelle, Citrix CTX1, Lorenz cipher, and Radio cipher (using NATO/Military phonetic alphabet content encoding). The challenges are used within Buchanan's teaching as an introduction to Applied Cryptography.

Buchanan uses a number of teaching style in the teaching of cybersecurity, network security and cryptography. This includes using podcasts,[319] YouTube videos for formal lectures, and practical demonstrations. As part of the teaching of Applied Cryptography and Trust module for an MSc class, he has used a Doodle method of the teaching a range of topics, such as for Cipher Fundamentals,[320] Symmetric Key Encryption,[321] and Hashing methods.[322]

From August 2007, Buchanan setup and ran the NetworkSims.com site, and which delivered a Microsoft Windows-based set of simulators which mimicked Cisco devices for routers, switches, PIX/ASA firewall and an Aironet. These were written in C#, and, in April 2013, he ported these over to Web version and integrated with ASecuritySite.com. These simulators run using a Web console and have challenges for routing, switching, security, wireless and voice for Cisco devices.[323]

On 21 June 2012, Buchanan presented a laureation for Prof John Howie[326] in the award of an Honorary Doctorate and outlined, "Over the years, John has become a world-leading expert and visionary in computer security. He has worked at the highest level in his field within Microsoft's Redwood headquarters, and now heads a world-leading security alliance on cloud-based systems."[327] Also, on 21 June 2012, Buchanan presented a laureation for Steven Cordiner[328] for a Doctor of Technology and outlined, "Steve has been a leading proponent and visionary for optimization within the oil and gas industry, especially in promoting savings in CO2 emissions before it became a world-wide issue."[329]

On 5 July 2016, Buchanan presented a laureation for Dr David Lanc[330] for a Doctor of Enterprise, and outlined, "Prior to entrepreneurial life, David was responsible for leading significant aspects of the successful RBS-NatWest integration. He also led the merger integration of Scottish Widows and Lloyds TSB, and the strategy for the merged business."[331]

Buchanan has organised many conferences and symposiums which focus on innovation. On 12 January 2023, he organised the, "Symposium on Technology Innovation and Collaboration" at the Merchiston Campus at Edinburgh Napier University.[332] It included invited talks from the spin-outs Buchanan was involved with, including from Bruce Ramsay (Cyacomb),[333] Dr Jamie Graves (Zonefox) and Dr Pavlos Papadopoulos.[334] The endnote talk was given by Professor Mark Logan and who outlined, "The Future of Innovation in Scotland".[335]

Examples of recent invited presentations include:

• Apr 2017, presented an invited for Sidney Michaelson Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Science Festival.[336]
• Oct 2017, presented an invited talk at Scotchain 17[337] at the RBS Gogarburn Campus.
• May 2018, presented "Futurist academic research into AI" at IISP Congress 2018 in London.[338]
• Dec 2018, presented at FutureScot 2018 on innovation.[339]
• Jun 2018, presented at the Crypto Valley Conference[340] on Blockchain Technology in Zug, Switzerland.
• Jun 2019, presented on "Creating a more trusted, secure and citizen-focused world" at Cybersecurity (Public Sector) 2019.[341]
• Oct 2019, presented an invited talk at Interrupt 19 at West Lothian College.[342]
• Nov 2019, presented an invited talk on "The Risks of Cybersecurity" at Digit Expo 2019 in the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.[343]
• Nov 2019, presented an invited talk on ransomware at the FutureScot's Cyber Security Conference.[344]
• Jun 2020, presented in the "Security and Resilience at the Heart of Transformation" session at Digital Scotland 2020.[345]
• Mar 2021, presented "Innovation in Cybersecurity" at Scot-Secure Virtual Summit.[346]
• Nov 2021, presented, "Cybersecurity Threats", at Digital Scotland 2021.[347]
• Feb 2022, presented on "Building a more trusted digital world" at FutureScot Annual Conference.[348]
• Feb 2023, presented in "The future of cybersecurity: Offering citizens a safer digital world, from digital signing, to quantum, AI defence and the blockchain" session at FutureScot Cybersecurity 2023.[349]

He regularly presents in the media, including with a podcast on the BBC World Service entitled, "Will we ever run out of cloud storage?".[350]