Bill Buchanan

William Johnston Buchanan OBE FBCS CEng PFHEA (born 6 March 1961) is a Scottish computer scientist.

Buchanan is a professor in the School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment.

He currently leads the Blockpass ID Lab and the Centre for Cybersecurity, IoT and Cyberphysical at Edinburgh Napier University.

Buchanan was born in Falkirk, Scotland, in 1961.

He attended Victoria Park Primary School in Falkirk and then attended Graeme High School.

On leaving school - from 1977 to 1981 - he was an Apprentice Electrician at the ICI Ltd in Grangemouth.

He spent 1977 to 1978 at Falkirk Technical College studying Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Between 1981 and 1986, Buchanan studied for a BEng (Hons) in Communication and Electronic Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University.

During this time, he undertook work placements with Racal-MESL and the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh.

Then, in 1986, he became a lecturer and initially taught electronics, before moving onto computer engineering, data communications and networking.

From 1989 to 2003, he was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and then as a Reader in the School of Computing from 2003 to 2006.

He gained his PhD in 1996 with a thesis entitled, "Analysis of electromagnetic wave propogation using 3D finite-difference time-domain methods with parallel processing".

Buchanan was promoted to a professor in 2006.

ASecuritySite.com was first released on 15 Feb 2013.

In December 2023, he received the "Most Innovative Teacher of the Year" award at the Times Higher Education Awards 2023.

In Dec 2023, he was appointed to the Bank of England CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency) Academic Advisory Group (AAG).

On 21 Dec 2015, Buchanan gave evidence for the Investigatory Powers Bill debate in the House of Commons: "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."

Buchanan's current research work focuses on areas of applied cryptography, blockchain, cybersecurity, citizen focused health care and digital identity.

He is included in the World's Top 2% Scientists list for 2022, and ranks in the Top 40 most cited research authors in Applied Cryptography.

In Unit of Assessment 11 (Computer Science and Infomatics) within REF 2021, Buchanan led two research impact case studies: "Enabling Sensitive Personal Data to be Shared with Trust using Novel Digital Security Methods", and "Protecting Employees, Children and Sensitive Data using Innovative Approaches to Cyber Security".

Both of these impact case studies were graded as 4* (quality that is 'outstanding impacts in terms of their reach and significance' ).

On 6 May 2015 he launched The Cyber Academy at the Merchiston Campus of Edinburgh Napier University.

He received the Principal's Award for contribution to Knowledge Exchange/Research in 2016 (Innovation of the Year and also Best Contribution to Information Society research theme) and in 2017 (Innovation of the year in Knowledge Exchange).

Buchanan's research areas has recently focused on cryptography, cybersecurity and digital identity.

Buchanan's focus on patents has mainly focused on work related to spin-out companies, and thus for IP protection: has co-authored a number of patents.

These include:

An additional patent related to work with Dr David Lanc and Dr Lu Fan and related to work with Payfont.

It is now assigned to Leading Software Ltd:

Buchanan leads the Blockpass ID Lab (BIL) and which was initially co-funded by Blockpass IDN and Edinburgh Napier University.

In 2017, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to cyber security.

Buchanan is an enthusiast for cryptography and innovation.

Buchanan teaches Network Security and Applied Cryptography in the School of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment at Edinburgh Napier University, and his research focus is around digital identity, cryptography and blockchain.

This applies into areas of health care and cybersecurity.

He is the creator of ASecuritySite, and which hosts a wide range of cryptography applications, including within public key encryption, symmetric key encryption, digital signatures and key exchange methods.

Buchanan was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in June 2017.

He was the first person in the UK to receive an award for services to Cybersecurity.

It is located on the Merchiston Campus and was launched on 26 September 2018.

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 and TRUSTEE, 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, Vaccination Certificates and Passports, Privacy-preserving passive DNS, and Combat fake content detection.