Máire O’Neill MRIA

Image caption: Máire O’Neill MRIA, 2024 RIA Gold Medallist in the Engineering Sciences.

Citation on the awarding of the 2024 RIA Gold Medal in the Engineering Sciences to Máire O'Neill MRIA

Written on 29 February 2024

Professor Máire O’Neill has made pioneering research contributions in the areas of hardware security and applied cryptography that have resulted in the practical application of complex security algorithms and novel authentication approaches that meet the real-time computation and resource-constrained requirements of ICT systems, services and applications.

Her major research contributions to date include:

• High-speed silicon chip architectural optimisations of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm, today’s most widely used encryption algorithm, that resulted in the highest speed design at the time, allowing its use in securing satellite communications. 

• Optimised hardware architectures of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) SHA-3 hash function candidates. This work was invited for presentation at one of NIST’s candidate conferences in 2010, which formed part of their standardisation process. In 2015, to celebrate 25 years of the International Conference on Field-programmable Logic & Applications (FPL) this research was named as one of a select number of papers ‘deemed to have most strongly influenced theory and practice in the field’.

• A lightweight Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) chip design that can be used to uniquely identify an electronic device and is the most compact PUF design reported to date.

• Novel architectural optimisations of polynomial multipliers leading to high-speed post quantum cryptographic architectures. Quantum computers pose a threat to currently deployed cyber security systems as they will be able to break the underlying mathematics; and post quantum cryptography is a form of cryptography that relies on complex mathematical problems that are resilient to these quantum computing attacks 

• The first deep-learning based automated hardware trojan detection system based on gate-level netlists to effectively detect hardware trojans without any pre-knowledge of the circuits. Hardware trojans are malicious modifications of integrated circuits. 

O’Neill has also been successful in research translation. Early in her career her novel research on high-speed Advanced Encryption Standard hardware designs was commercialized by Amphion Semiconductors and used to provide security in 100 million digital TV decoders worldwide by 2011. She also licensed novel security IP for Electric Vehicle charging systems to LG-CNS and, Accenture and Thales used her Physical Unclonable Function design alongside block chain technology to address electronic component counterfeiting. 

She successfully co-ordinated the €3.8M EU H2020 project on Secure Architectures of Future Emerging Cryptography from 2015 - 2019 with 8 partners from across Europe. Key achievements of the project included the uptake of her research on post quantum cryptography by Thales and Dell EMC.

To date Professor O’Neill has published 2 research monographs, 7 book chapters and over 200 peer-reviewed conference and journal papers. She has secured £48M in research funding (£25M as Principal Investigator) from UKRI, EU, the European Space Agency, the UK National Cyber Security Centre, Rolls Royce and the Royal Academy of Engineering. 

In 2010 she was promoted to Professor at Queen’s, the first female Professor in Electrical and Electronic Engineering and its youngest Engineering Professor at the time (aged 32). She was awarded a Regius Professorship in 2020.

In 2018 O’Neill was appointed Director of the UK-side Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems, funded by UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and EPSRC, collaborating with the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol and Birmingham. She also became Director of the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), which comprises ~60 staff, having played a key leadership role since it was established in 2009. CSIT is a recognised EPSRC/NCSC Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. It was awarded a 2015 Queen’s Anniversary Prize, the UK’s most prestigious recognition for an academic institution. CSIT’s impact has contributed to NI becoming the UK’s leading cyber security business cluster, which now has >100 companies employing 2700 cyber professionals. 

Her significant contributions have been recognised by her election as Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering in 2015, as member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2017 and Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering  in 2019.  Notable research awards to date include being named 2007 British Female Inventor of the Year, a 2014 Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, a 2019 Blavatnik Finalist Award for Young Scientists, an honorary OBE for services to computer security in 2021 and … now the 2024 Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal.

In 2018 O’Neill was appointed Director of the UK-side Research Institute in Secure Hardware and Embedded Systems, funded by UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and EPSRC, collaborating with the Universities of Cambridge, Bristol and Birmingham. She also became Director of the Centre for Secure Information Technologies (CSIT), which comprises ~60 staff, having played a key leadership role since it was established in 2009. CSIT is a recognised EPSRC/NCSC Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research. It was awarded a 2015 Queen’s Anniversary Prize, the UK’s most prestigious recognition for an academic institution. CSIT’s impact has contributed to NI becoming the UK’s leading cyber security business cluster, which now has >100 companies employing 2700 cyber professionals.

Her significant contributions have been recognised by her election as Fellow of the Irish Academy of Engineering in 2015, as member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2017 and Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering  in 2019.  Notable research awards to date include being named 2007 British Female Inventor of the Year, a 2014 Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, a 2019 Blavatnik Finalist Award for Young Scientists, an honorary OBE for services to computer security in 2021 and now the 2024 Royal Irish Academy Gold Medal.