2022 Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute Annual Conference

DAY ONE

Welcome Address

Charmaine Dean - Vice President, Research and International - Professor at the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science - UWaterloo

Dr. Charmaine B. Dean (Ph.D., University of Waterloo) is Vice-President, Research and International at the University of Waterloo. In this role, she provides leadership in the areas of research and innovation, commercialization, and internationalization. She is also responsible for building strategic alliances and partnerships with other academic institutions, governments, businesses, and industries at the domestic and international levels.
Several key portfolios are managed by her office, including the university-level Centres and Institutes and several major industrial partnerships spanning various units in the university. She has drawn a focus to ethics and social impact related to technology developments through various initiatives and is a key driver for equity and diversity in the context of research and internationalization.
Prior to joining the University of Waterloo, Dr. Dean served as the Dean of Science at Western University from 2011 to 2017. She also played a major role in establishing the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University, as the Associate Dean of that Faculty, and was the founding Chair of the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at Simon Fraser University.
Dr. Dean has led several other organizations (e.g., Statistical Society of Canada), has served on others (e.g., Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada), and received numerous awards for her work (e.g., the CRM-SSC prize, FAAAS, FASA, FIMS).

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State of CPI

N. Asokan - Executive Director, CPI - Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo

Professor N. Asokan joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in September 2019 as a Professor and David R. Cheriton Chair in Software Systems. He is the Executive Director of CPI.

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The Erosion of Social Capital Online and How We Can Revive It

Abstract:

The Internet has been a force for so much good for so many.  But it has also been a conduit for crime and despair. Large sums of money misappropriated through cybercrime makes headlines. We’re starting to learn more about how our trust is eroding online. What about the loss of innocence and optimism, is that next?

Neil Desai, an executive with Canadian cyber-investigation solution developer, Magnet Forensics, will highlight how the perverse use of online platforms, marketplaces, and other technologies inadvertently contributed to the harm of vulnerable populations like children and youth, immigrants, seniors, and those suffering from mental illness. Not to worry, he is a glass half-full type and has ideas as to how technology, education, and collaborations between public and private sector can contribute to safer communities on and offline.

Neil Desai - Vice President Magnet Forensics - Senior Fellow Centre for International Governance Innovation

Neil Desai is an executive with Magnet Forensics, a Canadian technology company that develops digital investigation solutions used by more than 4,000 police, national security, and other public and private organizations to investigate cybercrime and cyber-enabled crimes such as human trafficking and terrorism in more than 100 countries. He serves as a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, an executive in residence with the Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst and is a faculty member at Singularity University. Neil Serves on the board of directors of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario, Innovation Asset Collective, Public Policy Forum, ClearRisk Inc. and served two terms as a director with YMCA Canada. He previously held senior roles in the Canadian government at Global Affairs Canada and with the Office of the Prime Minister.

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Are We Safe in the “Internet from Space”?

Abstract:

Satellite Internet services are vital to today’s communications infrastructure by supporting global connectivity, e.g., extending broadband services to remote communities. However, satellites’ wide beam ranges have made satellite Internet links highly susceptible to long-range eavesdropping attacks. Even though Internet users can leverage encryption to shield their communications, eavesdroppers can still learn comprehensive details about users, like their web-browsing habits, by analyzing a wealth of metadata leaked by these connections. In this talk, I will first cover some of the latest trends in the development of Internet services that rely on satellite connectivity. This will open the floor for a discussion about how eavesdroppers can analyze the metadata of satellite Internet links, and about the impacts that such analysis may have on the privacy of satellite Internet users. The talk will wrap up with an overview of the challenges and opportunities involved in devising efficient metadata protection mechanisms for satellite links towards upholding users’ legitimate rights to online privacy.

Diogo Barradas - CPI - Assistant Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo

Diogo Barradas is an Assistant Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, a member of the CrySP group, and a member of the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute. Prof. Barradas completed his Ph.D. in Information Systems and Computer Engineering at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) - Universidade de Lisboa, developing his research within the Distributed Systems Group at INESC-ID Lisboa.

Before joining the University of Waterloo, Prof. Barradas interned as a research scholar at Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Security & Privacy Institute in early 2020 and, in late 2021, was appointed as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Rice University. Prof. Barradas publishes regularly in the top venues for computer and communication security and privacy (ACM CCS, USENIX Security, NDSS), as well as in other top venues specialized on computer privacy, such as the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), the world’s premier forum exclusively dedicated to computer privacy.

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Panel on Addressing the Cybersecurity Talent Gap

Abstract:

There is a global undersupply of security/privacy professionals who can provide technology leadership, test and secure network systems, and offer training in proprietary software protection. Managing the security of data, infrastructure, and AI/ML algorithms, is crucial to maintaining a competitive and functioning society. What are the ways in which government, academia, and private industry, can work to address the talent gap in Canada, and strive towards being cybersecurity/privacy leaders worldwide?

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Facilitator: Anindya Sen - Associate Director, CPI - Director; Professor at the Department of Economics - UWaterloo

Anindya Sen is a professor at the Department of Economics where he has taught since 1998 and is the current director of Master of the Public Service program. He was the Associate Chair (Graduate Studies) for Economics before his directorship of the program and was recently the Acting Associate Dean of Co-op and Planning for the Faculty of Arts. Prior to working at the university, Professor Sen was an Economist at the Competition Bureau, Industry Canada. He is also the Associate Director for CPI.

Professor Sen has been with the Master of Public Service program from its inception as a member of the cross-disciplinary program development team. His research interests are in the economics of public policy, with an emphasis on estimating the statistical effects of government intervention. In this respect, he has published research on the impacts of higher cigarette taxes on smoking, the effects of higher minimum wages on employment and poverty, the relationship between clearance rates and crime, and the consequences of incentive programs on electricity usage. His work on the effects of retail alcohol and marijuana deregulation has been acknowledged and cited in the National Post, The Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Star. Professor Sen's current research interests are in the working of data markets and understanding how individuals choose optimal levels of privacy in their online engagement.

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 Panelist: Ken Barker - Director of ISPIA - University of Calgary 

 Ken Barker Ph.D., FCIPS, I.S.P., ITCP is a professor of computer science at the University of Calgary. He holds a PhD in computing science from the University of Alberta (1990) and has many years of experience working with industrial computer systems. He has interest in system integration, distributed systems, database systems, and the privacy and security of data repositories. He has served as the dean of the faculty of science and as head of computer science at the University of Calgary. He is the director of the University of Calgary’s Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance and the president of the Alberta body of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS Alberta). He is one of the founding directors of the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC) and chairs the Initiation Transition Committee (C-ITC). He is a Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a Fellow of the Canadian Information Processing Society, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Life-time Member of the ACM. He is the President of CIPS Alberta and is a past president of the Canadian Association of Computer Science (CACS/AIC) in addition to having served on the Computer Science Accreditation Council.  As the director of research laboratories at the University of Calgary and University of Manitoba he has supervised over 70 graduate students, in addition to several post-doctorates and research assistants. Dr. Barker has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications.

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Panelist: Deborah Clark-Forster- Senior Account Executive, Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade - Province of Ontario

As a Senior Account Executive with the Ministry of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, Deborah (Deb) Clark-Forster has a passion for growing the burgeoning cybersecurity sector in Ontario, Canada.

Deb is driven to accelerate market development for domestic companies while helping international firms expand and prosper in one of the world’s most dynamic cybersecurity hubs. 

With over two decades of experience, Deb has developed inimitable expertise in client engagement and stakeholder relations within the investment and trade space. Her acute knowledge of the digital economy has earned her a stellar reputation as one of the leading cybersecurity champions in the province.

Panelist: Sanjeev Gill - Associate Vice President of Innovation and Executive Director of WatSPEED - UWaterloo

Sanjeev Gill is currently the Associate Vice President of Innovation and Executive Director of WatSPEED at University of Waterloo. Prior, he was at IBM for 21 years. Some of his roles there included National Industry Leader for Research, Global Client Executive and Business Unit Executive. Gill has a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and diploma in Engineering from Dalhousie University.

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Panelist: Ryan Westman - Sr. Manager, Threat Intelligence - eSentire Threat Response Unit

As Sr. Manager, Threat Intelligence, Ryan is responsible for demystifying the Threat Landscape for eSentire's Threat Response Unit. His goal is to detect, and respond to threats before they become risks to eSentire's client base.

 Prior to eSentire, Ryan spent three years at Deloitte Canada, helping build, develop, and establish a Threat Intelligence & Analytics team. Prior to Deloitte, Ryan was a member of Canada's Federal Public Service for over 5 years, employed by Public Safety Canada in Policy, and in the Canadian Armed Forces working in a variety of roles including Influence Activities and Civil Military Cooperation.

 Ryan holds a BA in Political Science & History from Wilfrid Laurier University, a MSc in Counter-Terrorism from the University of Central Lancashire; where he conducted primary research on individuals perceptions of terrorism through Social Media, and a Master's degree from the University of Waterloo, and is a GIAC Certified Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst.

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Poster Session & Reception

During this time period attendees will be free to view our poster session entries, network, and enjoy catered refreshments

For a list of Posters & Abstracts, click here.

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End of Session

DAY TWO

Morning Welcome & Awards

N. Asokan - Executive Director, CPI - Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo

Asokan will announce the Poster Session winners and other awards, as well as outlining the day's events.

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The Lasting Challenges in Cybersecurity and Opportunities to Disrupt Them

Abstract:

Machine learning was first employed commercially to block malware prior to the first release of Windows 95, and malware thrives today.  Challenges last still also for system intrusions, exploits of network-facing services, credentials misuse, and even spam.  Why?  A ready answer, classic, easily understood, and perhaps leaned on too readily, is that security is always and forever a cat and mouse game where attackers break every new defense.  In this talk we examine some of the fundamental and lasting challenges in cybersecurity and suggest potential ways to adjust priorities and approaches to better meet some of them, for both the research and education communities.

Andrew Walenstein - Director of Security R&D/Advanced Technology Development Labs Division - BlackBerry

BlackBerry’s Advanced Research Lab is an R&D-focused arm of BlackBerry whose main mission is accelerating technical innovation across BlackBerry’s extensive portfolio of products and services. Andrew Walenstein is the Senior Director of BlackBerry Labs, and leads the Advanced Research team within the lab, and runs both the funded R&D program and academic partnerships program. Before joining BlackBerry ten years ago he was formerly an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

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Panel on National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC)

Abstract:

In 2020, CPI and cybersecurity/privacy centers of excellence within four other Canadian universities from across the country joined forces to found the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC) as a federally incorporated not-for-profit consortium to further cybersecurity and privacy research, training, and commercialization in Canada. The formation of NCC was the culmination of several years of collaboration and discussion among the founding partners towards unifying industrial and academic efforts to further cybersecurity and privacy in Canada. Earlier this year, the Government of Canada appointed NCC to lead Canada’s new Cyber Security Innovation Network (CSIN). The CSIN program will receive up to $80 million in funding via Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) over a 4-year period towards a potential total project budget well above $160 million, including significant cash and in-kind contributions from supporting organizations that span academic institutions and industry across Canada. In this panel, two co-directors of NCC, Ken Barker and Charles Finlay, will discuss the vision and origins of NCC as well as topics concerning the CSIN program. The panel will be moderated by N. Asokan, who is also a co-director of NCC.

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Facilitator: N. Asokan - Executive Director, CPI – Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo

Professor N. Asokan joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in September 2019 as a Professor and David R. Cheriton Chair in Software Systems. He is the Executive Director of CPI.

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Panelist: Ken Barker - Director of ISPIA - University of Calgary

Ken Barker Ph.D., FCIPS, I.S.P., ITCP is a professor of computer science at the University of Calgary. He holds a PhD in computing science from the University of Alberta (1990) and has many years of experience working with industrial computer systems. He has interest in system integration, distributed systems, database systems, and the privacy and security of data repositories. He has served as the dean of the faculty of science and as head of computer science at the University of Calgary. He is the director of the University of Calgary’s Institute for Security, Privacy and Information Assurance and the president of the Alberta body of the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS Alberta). He is one of the founding directors of the National Cybersecurity Consortium (NCC) and chairs the Initiation Transition Committee (C-ITC). He is a Fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a Fellow of the Canadian Information Processing Society, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a Life-time Member of the ACM. He is the President of CIPS Alberta and is a past president of the Canadian Association of Computer Science (CACS/AIC) in addition to having served on the Computer Science Accreditation Council.  As the director of research laboratories at the University of Calgary and University of Manitoba he has supervised over 70 graduate students, in addition to several post-doctorates and research assistants. Dr. Barker has published over 250 peer-reviewed publications.

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Panelist: Charles Finlay - Executive Director of Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst - Toronto Metropolitan University

Charles founded the Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst in 2018 with a vision to build Canada’s leading hub for cybersecurity innovation and collaboration. Prior to founding the Catalyst, Charles served as chief of staff and director of policy for the Ontario Minister of Economic Development and Growth, where he worked closely with private sector and government leaders to develop and implement the province’s strategy to make Ontario a global leader in technology innovation and commercialization. Before joining government, Charles practiced law at BMO Capital Markets and Torys LLP, worked as a technology researcher at Forrester Research, and was a freelance business journalist for The Globe and Mail and Canadian Business Magazine. Charles has served on the boards of The Gerstein Centre, Social Planning Toronto, and Houselink Community Homes.

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Differential Privacy: Potential and Limitations

Abstract:

Differential privacy (DP) has been increasingly accepted as the de facto standard for data privacy in the research community, and is being applied to more and more application domains.  In this talk we explore the potential and limitations of DP from two aspects.  We will explore the meaning of DP, trying to answer the question: “Under what condition(s), does the notion of DP deliver the promised privacy guarantee?”  We show that the answer is quite nuanced and depends on legal and ethical considerations that need to be discussed by the community. 

Ninghui Li - Professor of Computer Science - Purdue University - Centre for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security
 

Ninghui Li is Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University.  He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University in 2000.  His research interests are in security and privacy, on which he has published over 200 referred papers.  He is currently Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, and served as Program Chair for several leading conferences in the field, including ACM CCS and ESORICS.  He served as Chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC) from 2017 to 2021, and is ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.

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How Practical is zkSNARK Enabled Blockchain Privacy?

Abstract:

How can a prover named Alice, prove to a verifier, named Bob, that a hash value is correctly evaluated efficiently without sending Bob the pre-image of the hash value?  This is the core design on Zcash cryptocurrency in order to provide transaction privacy.  Actually, all existing blockchain privacy solutions employ advanced “cryptographic engines”, namely zero-knowledge proof verifiable computation schemes. Currently, the zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge (zkSNARK) approach is the most promising, which is built on (fully) homomorphic encryption  (e.g., GGPR13/Groth16 implemented in Zcash) or probabilistic check proofs (PCP) (e.g.,  the lightweight coin Ligero, Stark and Aurora). In this talk, I will first present an overview for the current research along this line, then I will provide a concrete example of zkSNARK schemes, namely Polaris, our recent work for Rank-1 Constraint Satisfaction (RICS) circuits. The verifier’s costs and the proof size are  bounded by the square of logarithm of  the size of an arithmetic circuit. It does not require a trusted setup and is plausibly post-quantum secure; when employed, secure hash function is plausibly post-quantum resistant.  For instance, for verifying a SHA-256 preimage (about  23k AND gates) in zero-knowledge with 128 bits security, the proof size is less than 150kB and the verification time is less than 11ms, both competitive to existing systems with better concrete verifiers' complexity.  However, is this practical in a blockchain network consisting of  thin client and miner nodes?

Guang Gong - CPI - Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering - UWaterloo

Dr. Guang Gong is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Waterloo, Canada since 2004. Currently, her research focuses on pseudorandom generation, lightweight cryptography (LWC), IoT security, blockchain privacy and privacy preserving machine learning. She has authored or coauthored more than 360 technical papers, two books, and three patents. She serves/served as an Associate Editor for several journals including an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2005-2008, 2017 - 2018, 2020-), the IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (Nov 2021 - ), and the Journal of Cryptography and Communications (2007 - ) and has served on numerous technical program committees and conferences as the co-chair/organizer or committee member.

Dr. Gong has received several awards, including the Premier's Research Excellence Award (2001), Ontario, Canada, Ontario Research Fund - Research Excellence Award (2010), IEEE Fellow (2014) for her contributions to sequences and cryptography applied to communications and security, and the University Research Chair (2018-2024). Dr. Gong's research is supported by government grant agencies as well as industrial grants.

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Panel on Data Collection and Effective Public Policy

Video link here

Abstract:

In this session, the panelists will discuss the role of cybersecurity in supporting privacy, and the promises and shortcomings of Canada's proposed new privacy legislation in Bill C-27.

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Facilitator: Ian Goldberg - CPI - Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science - UWaterloo

Ian Goldberg is the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies and a Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. He is an author of over 100 peer-reviewed publications in the areas of privacy enhancing technologies, computer security, cryptography, and related fields, and has been working in these areas for over 25 years. He is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery, the former Chair of the Board of Directors of The Tor Project, and a winner of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award, the Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, and the USENIX Security Test of Time Award.

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Panelist: Lyall King - Director of Risk Mitigation Programs - Canadian Centre for Cyber Security

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Closing Remarks

Colin Russell - Managing Director, CPI - UWaterloo

Colin will conclude this conference with brief closing remarks.

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