UOW Distinguished Professor Willy Susilo is part of an international team pioneering AI-fuelled drone technology. Photo: Michael Gray.
Long before cybersecurity was a household term, Willy Susilo was using his specialised skills in cryptography to design security systems for tech giants.
Today, the Distinguished Professor and Australian Laureate Fellow at the University of Wollongong (UOW) is turning his expertise skyward, helping safeguard autonomous drones that could soon be used in everything from disaster response to critical infrastructure protection.
Susilo’s fascination with the mathematics behind cryptography began decades ago, and it was this foundation that set him apart in a field that, at the time, barely existed.
“I started back when the term ‘cybersecurity’ wasn’t well known. We talked about computer security, then information security — essentially securing data itself,” he says. “Now, suddenly, cybersecurity is everywhere. Everything is online, and if we don’t stay ahead of it, the risks to our country are huge.”
After completing his PhD at UOW, Susilo began his academic career at the university as a lecturer in 2001. Over the next two decades, he rose through the ranks, becoming a senior lecturer, associate professor, professor and eventually a distinguished professor.
Along the way, he developed cryptographic algorithms adopted by global technology companies, including IBM, and earned the Australian Laureate Fellowship — the only one awarded in the cybersecurity domain until now — for his work securing cloud computing systems.
More recently, Susilo’s research has increasingly intersected with artificial intelligence, an area where his cryptography background has found a natural application.
One of the most promising and complex frontiers is multi-drone systems. Unlike a single drone, which is relatively easy to monitor and secure, multiple drones operating together can coordinate their actions and make decisions collectively.
That coordination opens the door to both remarkable technological advances and potential vulnerabilities.
“You can think of a multi-drone system like a team of people working together. It’s easy to spot an individual causing trouble, but harder to see what a coordinated group might do,” Susilo explains.
“For example, think of someone wanting to pick a pocket in public. If they’re attempting it solo, it’s easier to spot them approaching their target. But if they had accomplices — one to provide a distraction, one to bump into that person, all the players seemingly work in isolation but really, they’re collaborators — it’s more possible to pull off without detection.
“Our work is about strengthening these systems so they can resist attacks, detect unusual behaviour in real time, and operate safely even in high-risk environments.”
That work is now part of a $1.8 million international collaboration funded by NATO’s Science for Peace and Security Programme.
The project, titled Robustness against Adversarial Attacks for Intelligent Multi Drone Agents (RAID), brings together leading researchers from Australia, Finland, Spain and the UK.
At UOW, Susilo leads a team that will develop advanced AI technologies capable of defending multi-drone systems from spoofing, signal jamming, data poisoning and other forms of interference.
The outcomes of the project are intended to go beyond military applications, with potential benefits for disaster response, environmental monitoring and critical infrastructure protection.
Open-source frameworks, field-tested prototypes and secure integration guidelines will be made available to governments, industry and research communities around the world.
For Susilo, the NATO project represents the latest chapter in a career defined by curiosity, rigour and a sense of responsibility.
“AI is advancing every aspect of life, but our understanding and accountability in these systems are still developing. By combining AI with cybersecurity, we can ensure the technology is trustworthy and resilient,” he says.
