Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

With the interest of protecting public safety, the Canadian Parliament completed the second reading of Bill C-26 in March 2023, which presents an Act focused mainly on cybersecurity, amending the Telecommunications Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts. The proposed research program aligns closely with such public interest where the overarching innovative element in this program is building attack-resilient Next Generation Networks (NGN). In this proposal, the term NGN refers to the evolving communication networks that are expected to serve as critical infrastructure for society in an unprecedented way. The COVID19 pandemic demonstrated how important the communication infrastructure is. Post pandemic, in addition to their importance in the daily lives of billions of people, NGN are also expected to be a crucial element in supporting other critical infrastructures such as power grids and transportation systems. The proposed program adopts the vision that while the current security practices served us to get to this point, there is a pressing need for new security techniques that will work for NGN that will serve as critical (if not the most critical) infrastructures in our society. Therefore, the long-term objective of this proposed research program is: "to create new security techniques for next generation networks that will focus on dynamic defences, customized Machine Learning, and effective, scalable evaluation approaches." This will be achieved by pursuing the following innovative and complementary themes: -Dynamic security techniques which include detection in large networks. The program will also focus on deployable defences that rely on Federated Learning. Performance will be a key issue in deployability. -Machine learning geared towards network traffic and events: this theme will focus on studying practical attacks and defences that are based on Machine Learning in communication networks. -Effective, scalable network security evaluation approaches: this theme will deal with outdated and problematic datasets by trying to create new datasets in collaboration with other researchers and organizations. We will also continue our work on creating large scale network emulation environments. This program will have an impact on research through the creation of new research techniques that other researchers can utilize to enhance research in network security. It will also help train highly qualified personnel in areas that are crucial for the Canadian Information Security industry.