Research

Most of my work happens in industry, helping teams secure and integrate their systems. Some questions deserve a slower, more rigorous answer, where research comes in.

ORCID: 0009-0001-8779-3933

  • published Best Paper Award

    Beyond Data Residency: Compensating Controls for Sovereign Management of NHS Patient Data on AWS under the DSP Toolkit

    B.M.P.D. Balasooriya, D.P.P. Mahindapala
    APIIT International Research Conference 2026 (AIRC 2026), 1 October 2026. ISBN 978-624-6201-21-0

    Hosting NHS patient data in the AWS London Region settles where the data is stored. It does not settle who can act on it, because AWS is administered through a global management plane. The paper reviews 36 studies and finds no peer-reviewed work that maps the NHS Data Security and Protection (DSP) Toolkit v8 to concrete AWS controls. It proposes four compensating controls and tests them in a sandbox AWS organisation.

    • Customer-managed KMS keys keep decryption authority with the NHS.
    • Service Control Policies confine administrative action to the London Region.
    • An organisation-wide CloudTrail trail, written to an immutable S3 bucket, makes every privileged action auditable.
    • A self-hosted WSO2 API Manager gateway sits in front of all access to patient data.
    AWSNHS DSP ToolkitUK GDPRData sovereigntyCloud security
    Conference page ↗
    Cite (BibTeX) 
    @inproceedings{balasooriya2026beyond,
  author    = {Balasooriya, B. M. P. D. and Mahindapala, D. P. P.},
  title     = {Beyond Data Residency: Compensating Controls for Sovereign Management of {NHS} Patient Data on {AWS} under the {DSP} Toolkit},
  booktitle = {APIIT International Research Conference 2026},
  year      = {2026},
  month     = oct,
  isbn      = {978-624-6201-21-0},
  url       = {https://apiit.lk/international-research-hub-detail/apiit-international-research-conference-2026}
}

  • Cost-Optimization Algorithm Comparison for Fresh Crop Transportation in Sri Lanka

    Undergraduate research, University of Ruhuna, 2021

    Compared optimization methods to find the most suitable approach for minimizing the cost of transporting fresh crops in Sri Lanka. The findings were applied to build an agricultural marketing and transportation platform.

    OptimizationLogisticsAgriculture