Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The lockdown and remote working during the pandemic have significantly hastened the worldwide adoption of cloud/edge-based services. On the other hand, the recent nationwide disruption to one of the major telecommunication networks in Canada has clearly demonstrated the severe consequence of interruptions to such services. As our societies become increasingly dependent on cloud/edge-based services, the virtual infrastructures underpinning them will unavoidably become a highly attractive target of cyberattacks. Recent technological trends in virtual infrastructures may further exacerbate the situation as they typically focus more on costs, efficiency, and deployability rather than security. In such a context, the proposed research program aims to address emerging security challenges in virtual infrastructures by developing novel solutions for modeling, auditing, detecting, and mitigating security breaches or attacks. The main methodology is to explore the many unique characteristics of virtual infrastructures for security purposes, through an interdisciplinary approach of combining various techniques including formal verification, machine learning, threat modeling, security metrics, attack detection and mitigation, etc. In particular, the proposed research will follow four main themes: 1) Develop novel security modeling techniques to transform the typically binary, qualitative results of existing security mechanisms such as security auditing and event detection into security models and metrics that can reflect the overall security posture of virtual infrastructures; 2) Develop efficient runtime security auditing techniques to improve the security situational awareness by combining the rigor of formal security verification techniques and the efficiency of machine learning techniques; 3) Develop federated attack detection and provenance techniques for core/edge virtual infrastructures where sensitive data needed for the detection or provenance cannot be sent directly across organizational boundaries; 4) Develop proactive attack mitigation techniques to turn security breaches or attacks reported by auditing or detection solutions into defence actions that are launched early but in a non-disruptive manner in order to ensure service continuity. The potential outcome of the proposed research will bring technological and economic benefits to Canada as it could ease the concerns of Canadian companies and governmental agencies over potential service disruptions caused by security attacks on virtual infrastructures.