Consulting

Konstantin consults industry and government on the subject of his expertise.

About Konstantin

Prof. Dr. Konstantin (Kosta) Beznosov has over 25 years of experience in cybersecurity, with world-class expertise in human aspects of cyber security and privacy, systems security, and enterprise security. His primary research interests are usable privacy and security (UPS), AI security, and systems security. Before joining UBC in 2003, he worked as a Security Architect at two start-ups, where he designed and developed products for security integration of enterprise applications, as well as consulted large telecommunication and banking organizations on the architecture of security solutions for distributed enterprise applications. Over his career in cybersecurity, Dr. Beznosov

• Contributed to international standards on cybersecurity

  •  eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML),

  • the OMG standard on Resource Access Decision (RAD) Facility. He actively participated in standardization of security-related OMG’s specifications (CORBA Security, RAD, SDMM) from 1997 to 2001, and served as a co-chair of the Security SIG.

• Co-authored books for practitioners and research papers

  • 2 books (“Enterprise Security with EJB and CORBA” and “Mastering Web Services Security” by Wiley Computer Publishing) and

  • over 100 referred publications in international conferences and journals, with high academic impact (≈ 8,200 citations; h-index 47; i10-index 108).

  • has second highest h-index among Canadian researchers in category “usable privacy and security” 

  • has 4th highest h-index among Canadian researchers in category  “computer security”,

• Actively collaborated with top companies in industry

  • Samsung, Telus, Microsoft Research, Google, Honeywell, Yahoo!

  • on diverse research projects from network security to web and mobile privacy & security, to human and social factors of computer security.

• Served on program committees top academic conferences in the fields of 

  • cybersecurity (ACM CCS, IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, USENIX Security, NDSS, ACSAC, SACMAT, NSPW) and 

  • human aspects of cybersecurity (USENIX SOUPS, Privacy and Security subcommittee of ACM CHI), 

• Served on editorial boards of leading journals:

  • ACM Transactions on Information and System Security (TISSEC),

  • Elsevier’s Computers & Security.

Areas of Consulting Expertise

• Security and privacy reviews of designs and architectures for applications (servers and clients) and enterprise solutions, including AI-based systems.

• Usable security and privacy reviews and designs of security mechanisms, controls, or other security-critical parts of systems and solutions.

• Review and analysis of human and social factors in enterprises and consumer-oriented security  and privacy solutions.

• Solutions addressing human and social factors in security/privacy-critical systems, applications, and processes for mass consumers and organizational employees.

Past Consulting Engagements

• Prepared expert reports, as a subject matter expert

  • The TikTok App Class Action Lawsuit: “Thomas v. Bytedance Ltd, et al.”, Case No. S-209073, in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada.

  • The Google Incognito Mode Class Action Lawsuit: “Brian Reid v. Google LLC”, Case No. S-207444, in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada.

• Government of the Province of British Columbia, Canada. Served on the independent panel that advised the BC government on the benefits and risks of internet voting.

• Microsoft Research. Computer security research.

• Credit Suise First Boston (CSFB). Security architecture review and design for enterprise in-house solutions.

• Sprint. Security architecture review and design for enterprise in-house solutions.