The University of New Brunswick (UNB) in Fredericton recently became home to one of the first research facilities in Canada focusing solely on information and network security studies.
Dubbed the Information Security Centre of Excellence, the research centre was an offshoot of collaboration between UNB and network security management firm Q1 Labs. The centre is funded, for the most part, through a federal government grant of some $2.2 million awarded in 2004, said Ali Ghorbani, professor and assistant dean of the faculty of computer science at UNB and the lead researcher for the new centre.
There are currently seven researchers working at the centre. Five more researchers are expected to join the team by September, the professor said.
“Both organizations, UNB and Q1 Labs, realized that there are clearly some great opportunities for some forward-looking research in the security arena,” said Brendan Hannigan, chief operating officer for Q1 Labs.
A native of New Brunswick, Q1 Labs started as an entity within the UNB. Even after the company was acquired by a U.S. firm, Q1 Labs continued its collaboration with the university. Q1 Labs is headquartered in Waltham, Mass. but its research and development facility remains in Fredericton.
“We also have a good interaction in terms of hiring. We hire a lot of graduates from the university,” Hannigan said.
The research centre will focus its studies on five areas of information security: automated security rule tuning, learning and adaptation; network anomaly detection; multi-stage attack graphing and visualization; attack simulation; and automatic discovery and classification of network applications.
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