Grant: Alliance Grants

Telecommunication providers can provide cost-effective and scalable 5G services using public clouds. Such a cloud-native deployment of telecommunication services usually has a larger attack surface due to its inherent complexity such as the co-existence of multiple entities, different abstraction levels, and many underpinning technologies. A cloud-native telecommunication environment may also raise novel security challenges with its unique characteristics, such as the extensive softwarization of network devices and functions and the service operators' lack of direct accesses to the infrastructure. Addressing such security challenges is important since today's telecommunication networks have essentially become the nerve systems of our societies whose disruption may cause catastrophic impacts. Such impacts may include significant financial loss and widespread disruptions to emergency services, medical appointments, bank transactions, and government services, as evidenced in recent incidents. In partnership with Ericsson Canada, this project will develop a comprehensive framework of security solutions for cloud-native telecommunication environments. The framework will cover the verification, detection, investigation, and mitigation of security attacks, and address key limitations of existing works and unique challenges in the telecommunication context, such as the need for fast identification of security compliance breaches, the black-box detection which does not rely on direct access to the underlying infrastructure, the near-real-time (sub-second) response of the radio access network components, and the timely mitigation of attacks in the absence of security patches. The major outcomes of this project include new knowledge, models, solutions, and industrial demos, prototypes, and patents. These outcomes will generate both theoretic and practical impacts, by advancing state-of-the-art research and potentially creating new research directions, defending Canada's telecommunication services against security attacks, bringing both technological and economic benefits to the industrial partner , and training highly qualified personnel in a much needed and strategic area for Canada.