Mikaela Brough

I am a Lecturer in the Information Security Group (ISG), part of the Department of Computing, Security and Mathematics at Royal Holloway, University of London, in a teaching-focused position. My research sits at the intersection of anthropology and information security, examining how activists and at-risk communities understand, practise and manage information security in their everyday lives.

I submitted my PhD thesis in the ISG in September 2026 and am awaiting my viva.

Teaching

I currently teach Security Management and Introduction to Information Security. In my teaching, I aim to connect technical and organisational security concepts with the social contexts in which they are applied, encouraging students to consider who security is for and how it is experienced in practice.

Prior to my appointment as Lecturer, I worked as a teaching assistant across a range of modules, including Security Management, Introduction to Cryptography and Programming and Statistics. I have experience teaching programming primarily in Python, with working knowledge of R, C and Java.

I welcome enquiries from students interested in research on the human and social dimensions of security, including digital rights and surveillance, security practices in organisations and communities and qualitative and participatory approaches to security research. I also am interested in supervising projects across a wide range of cyber security topics.

Research

My current research interests include:

Understanding information security concerns and needs of at-risk communities
Ethnographic and Participatory research methods in security
Security and privacy practices of activists and social movements
Social and cultural dimensions of cryptography
Security management in informal, grassroots and professional organisations
Security culture(s)
Research ethics and societal harms

My research often takes an ethnographic approach, combining extended periods of embedded fieldwork, participant observation and formal and informal interviews. Engagement is central to this approach: I work collaboratively with participants and partner organisations, aiming to ensure that the research process and its outputs benefit the communities involved. My work also attends closely to the ethical and practical challenges of conducting research with at-risk groups, including participant safety, data protection and consent.

My former doctoral research was undertaken within the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Cyber Security for the Everyday, an interdisciplinary doctoral centre bringing together researchers in cryptography, systems security and the social sciences. It was supervised by Professor Rikke Bjerg Jensen and Professor Martin Albrecht, an ethnographer and a cryptographer respectively, and affiliated with their EPSRC-funded project Social Foundations of Cryptography.

For this research, I studied information security management within the UK climate movement and the Philippine environmental movement. In the Philippines, I led a over two-year formal collaboration with local universities and environmental advocacy groups, involving multiple periods of fieldwork. Publications arising from this research are currently under review. I will continue my involvement with Social Foundations of Cryptography Project at KCL as a Research Associate from 2026 to 2027.

Further details of my projects are available here.

Background

Alongside my doctoral research, I worked as a Research Assistant on a Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) project examining security convergence and emerging technologies. I previously worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford on qualitative social research projects, including work resulting in two publications on family planning.

I hold an MSc in Social Anthropology from the University of Oxford (2021), supervised by Dr Ina Zharkevich, and a BA from McGill University. I grew up in southern Ontario and divide my time outside work between London and southern Italy. My first language is English, but I also speak Italian (B2), have working knowledge of French (B1) and have been learning Tagalog (B1) for nearly three years.

Please feel free to get in touch by email.

news

Aug 17, 2026	I am excited to announce that I will be starting in September of this year as a Lecturer in the Information Security Group at Royal Holloway, University of London!
Aug 15, 2026	Honoured to receive the Distinguished Reviewer Award for USENIX Security ’26!
May 09, 2026	Really enjoyed taking part in conversations about ‘At-Compromise Security’ a new security notion derived from ethnographic fieldwork by members of the SFOC team at the Cryptographic Applications Workshop (CAW) and EUROCRYPT 2026 in Rome!
Sep 30, 2025	Had a great time at Privacy Camp 2025, organised by EDRi in Brussels —- great workshops on digital rights in times of rising authoritarianism & EU deregulation.
Aug 15, 2025	Wrapping up three great days at USENIX Security '25, where I presented new work on the UK climate movement. I'm also excited share that this work received an 'Honourable Mention for Best Paper' award!

selected publications

USENIX

On the Virtues of Information Security in the UK Climate Movement

Mikaela Brough, Rikke Bjerg Jensen , and Martin R. Albrecht

In Proceedings of the 34th USENIX Security Symposium , 2025

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We report on an ethnographic study with members of the climate movement in the United Kingdom (UK). We conducted participant observation and interviews at protests and in various activist settings. Reporting on the findings as they relate to information security, we show that members of the UK climate movement wrestled with (i) a fundamental tension between openness and secrecy; (ii) tensions between autonomy and collective interdependence in information-security decision-making; (iii) conflicting activist ideals that shape security discourses; and (iv) pressures from different social gazes – from each other, from people outside the movement and from their adversaries. Overall, our findings shed light on the social complexities of information-security research in activist settings and provoke methodological questions about programmes that aim to design for activists.
DSIT

Securing Converged Technologies: Insights from Subject Matter Experts

Andrew Dwyer , and Mikaela Brough

2025

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The convergence of existing and emerging technologies are increasingly reshaping contemporary capabilities of states, organisations, and society with significant risks and opportunities for cyber security. Based on research with 20 subject matter experts primarily from within the cyber security sector, this report examines the role of technology convergence, its impact upon cyber security, and potential policy responses to identifying and mitigating technology convergence in the domain. We present a series of findings on the challenges of identifying technology convergences for cyber security, how technology convergence operates across broader technology ecologies, and how engagement with a range of actors in order to build expert communities is essential to addressing and mitigating the impact of technology convergence for cyber security.