Securing Canada’s Information-Technology Infrastructure: Context, Principles, and Focus Areas of Cybersecurity Research

Abstract

This article addresses the challenges of cybersecurity and ultimately the provision of a stable and resilient information-technology infrastructure for Canada and, more broadly, the world. We describe the context of current cybersecurity challenges by synthesizing key source material whose importance was informed by our own real-world experiences. Furthermore, we present a checklist of guiding principles to a unified response, complete with a set of action-oriented research topics that are linked to known operational limitations. The focus areas are used to drive the formulation of a unified and relevant research and experimental development program, thereby moving us towards a stable and resilient cyberinfrastructure. When cybersecurity is viewed as an inherently interdisciplinary problem of societal concern, we expect that fundamentally new research perspectives will emerge in direct response to domain-specific protection requirements for information-technology infrastructure. Purely technical responses to cybersecurity challenges will be inadequate because human factors are an inherent aspect of the problem. This article will interest managers and entrepreneurs. Senior management teams can assess new technical developments and product releases to fortify their current security solutions, while entrepreneurs can harness new opportunities to commercialize novel technology to solve a high-impact cybersecurity problem..

Keywords

• Canada
• cyberdefence
• cyberinfrastructure
• cybersecurity
• entrepreneurship
• experimental development program
• information-technology infrastructure
• management
• research