Panel : Cyber Security in the Networks of the Future

October 14, 2020 – 15:30-16:45

Description:

Network attack and data breach statistics are abundant; from the 2020 Cisco Annual Internet Report citing an anticipated increase in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks from 7.9 million in 2018 to 15.4 million by 2023, to almost daily reports of data breaches, hackers targeting network device vulnerabilities, attacks on network services etc. This is, of course, unsurprising.  Our lives are increasingly reliant on communication networks. In 2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen the accelerated provision of health services in the home and an increased prevalence of home schooling and working. This has placed a significant burden on our home networks, one which cyber-criminals have been only too eager to exploit. The challenge to protect network users extends from there.
So, what does cyber security look like in the networks of the future? The emergence of technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), and Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) enable innovation in network security but these technologies create additional attack surfaces.  Dramatic advances in Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are influencing security services and design for security, but they can also be exploited to produce sophisticated attacks. Quantum computing is also on the horizon. How will we exploit these technologies while managing the challenge of the attacker to better protect, secure and maintain resilient networks? 
In this panel, we will address these questions considering the ideal vs. the practical: As we increase data, we can lose privacy. As we increase complexity, we can reduce reliability. With each new technology, do we create a solution or a threat?

Moderator: Sandra Scott-Hayward, Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Bio: Sandra Scott-Hayward received the Ph.D. degree from Queen’s University Belfast, U.K., in 2013, where she is currently a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) with the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a Member of the Centre for Secure Information Technologies. She began her career in industry, and became a Chartered Engineer in 2006 having worked as a Systems Engineer and Engineering Group Leader with Airbus. She has published a series of IEEE papers on performance and security designs for SDN, co-edited a Springer book Guide to Security in SDN and NFV–Challenges, Opportunities, and Applications published in December 2017, and served on the TPC of numerous IEEE and ACM conferences. Her research interests include the development of network security architectures and security functions for software-defined networks (SDN). She received Outstanding Technical Contributor and Outstanding Leadership awards from the ONF in 2015 and 2016, respectively. She is the TPC Co-Chair for IEEE NFV-SDN 2020. She was elected and served as the Vice-Chair of the Open Networking Foundation Security Working Group from 2015 to 2017.

Panel Members:

Alexander von Gernler, Genua GmbH, Germany
Antonio Manzalini, TIM, Italy
Makan Pourzandi, Ericsson Research, Canada

Additional members to be announced