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Current Projects

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into critical infrastructure systems, including water treatment, energy distribution, transportation, and manufacturing. AI is being used to interpret sensor data, optimize operations, detect anomalies, and support decision-making. While these capabilities can improve efficiency and adaptability, they also introduce new cybersecurity, safety, and governance challenges. Unlike traditional software, AI systems learn from data and may behave in ways that are not always transparent or predictable. As a result, failures, compromises, or manipulations of AI-enabled components can directly affect physical processes, safety mechanisms, and the delivery of essential public services.

This project investigates how AI-related failures and cyberattacks can propagate through critical infrastructure systems and create cascading consequences. Existing cybersecurity approaches largely focus on preventing attacks or estimating their likelihood, whereas our research focuses on understanding and managing the consequences when AI systems fail, are manipulated, or operate under adversarial conditions.

Using principles from consequence-driven engineering, we are developing a consequence-driven analysis framework for AI-enabled critical infrastructure. Through collaboration with infrastructure operators and the study of real-world systems, we aim to identify how AI is being integrated into critical environments, model how AI-related failures can affect critical functions, and develop practical approaches for mitigating and bounding their consequences. Ultimately, this work seeks to support the safe, secure, and trustworthy adoption of AI in critical infrastructure while strengthening Canada’s cyber resilience.

Collaboration Opportunities: As part of the Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst Fellowship, we are interested in collaborating with critical infrastructure operators, industry partners, and government stakeholders. We are particularly interested in learning how organizations are integrating AI into critical systems, the challenges they face in managing AI-related risks, and opportunities to develop realistic case studies for modeling and simulation. Contact Dr. Jason Jaskolka to learn more or get involved.

, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto ON, Canada

September 2026 – August 2027

Critical infrastructure systems rely on cyber-physical systems (CPS) to deliver essential services in sectors such as energy, healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and water treatment. Recent cyber incidents have demonstrated that attacks on these systems can disrupt operations, compromise safety, and lead to significant economic and societal consequences. However, most security approaches focus on preventing attacks and estimating their likelihood rather than understanding and managing what happens when attacks succeed.

This research develops a consequence-driven approach to CPS security that shifts the focus from “How likely is an attack?” to “What are the consequences if an attack succeeds?” and “How can those consequences be reduced?” Our goal is to provide engineers with methods and tools to identify, assess, and mitigate the impacts of cyber threats early in the system design process, helping ensure systems remain resilient even when compromised.

Using model-based engineering, quantitative analysis, simulation, and security assurance techniques, we are developing methods to understand how cyberattacks propagate through complex systems, measure the severity and cascading effects of their impacts, and construct evidence-based assurance arguments for resilient system design. These advances are being evaluated through case studies in healthcare, manufacturing, water treatment, and other critical infrastructure domains. Ultimately, this work aims to strengthen the resilience of critical infrastructure by enabling more informed, consequence-aware security decisions and providing practical tools for engineers, operators, and regulators responsible for protecting essential systems.

, Ottawa ON, Canada

April 2026 – March 2032

General Dynamics Mission Systems – Canada/�Ӱ�ԭ�� University Cyber Operations Reference Lab (GCOR Lab)

​The General Dynamics Mission Systems – Canada/�Ӱ�ԭ�� University Cyber Operations Reference Lab (GCOR Lab) is a collaborative research facility focused on advancing cybersecurity and cyber operations. The GCOR Lab supports several interdisciplinary projects that blend cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and policy research. Notable initiatives include:​

The General Dynamics Mission Systems–Canada/�Ӱ�ԭ�� University Cyber Operations Reference Lab (GCOR Lab) is a collaborative research facility dedicated to advancing cybersecurity and cyber operations through applied, interdisciplinary research. Operated in partnership with General Dynamics Mission Systems–Canada, the GCOR Lab is hosted within the CyberSEA Research Lab at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University and supports a range of projects that integrate cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and policy research.

Current GCOR Lab initiatives include:

• Cyber Gymnasium: A training and simulation platform designed to educate cyber operators, technicians, and analysts in defending network systems against adversarial attacks and tactics. The platform supports hands-on, scenario-based learning in a controlled cyber operations environment.
• Deception Network Simulation: A project focused on developing network topology models, populated with various host/node configurations for a set of representative networks using the RANGE modelling platform. The datasets generated from the models will be used in subsequent project phases in the training of an ML/AI algorithms to automate a cyber security attack response.
• Identify and Access Management in DDIL Environments: A project aimed at identifying and evaluating lightweight directory services and dynamic name resolution mechanisms suitable for tactical DDIL (Disconnected, Disrupted, Intermittent, Low-bandwidth) environments. The work emphasizes efficient, resilient access control under operational constraints.

, Ottawa ON, Canada
April 2024 – December 2026

Past Projects

This interdisciplinary project combines insights from cybersecurity, political science, and policy analysis, and seeks to study the role that technical and regulatory cybersecurity standards, guidelines and best practices in improve cyber-resilience in critical systems. The project focusses on three main directions with respect to security standards, regulations, guidlines, and best practices: (1) selection, (2) use, and (3) compliance. Part of this project explores the tensions that exist between engineers and policymakers. They often have similar goals and objectives, but face challenges when marrying the outcomes of technical cybersecurity evaluations with compliance to current cybersecurity policies, standards, and regulations. This results from the fact that these two communities do not “speak the same language” which presents a longstanding barrier preventing the realization of the mutual benefits of their individual contributions.

, Montréal, QC, Canada


April 2021 – March 2026

The overall aim of this research program is to establish comprehensive security assurance solutions by enhancing security-by-design approaches for engineering secure software-dependent systems. More specifically, it aims to develop more incremental, modular, and compositional solutions for securing systems from the outset and for generating sufficient evidence of their built-in resilience to a range of cyber-attacks and failures. This requires the integration of formal (mathematically rigorous) methods and security-by-design approaches to provide verifiable evidence to support security assurance claims from early stages of system development. We will achieve this by: (1) Developing formal modeling and analysis frameworks with which we can provide mathematical proofs of assurance of security properties of software-dependent systems at early stages of development; (2) Establishing system-level security evaluation methods and techniques for understanding and mitigating the risks to system assets posed by identified security vulnerabilities; and (3) Advancing techniques to support the management, evaluation, and presentation of sufficient evidence for developing incremental security assurance cases.

, Ottawa ON, Canada

April 2019 – March 2026

Low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations require high levels of security and resilience to provide high quality, reliable and trustworthy global connectivity services to customers. For these systems to develop customer trust and find widespread use, developers must demonstrate compliance to a variety of security standards, policies, and regulations. However, because these systems are very large and complex, it is difficult to clearly and effectively show how the system satisfies all of its compliance requirements throughout its development lifetime. In this project, we aim to develop an architecture and design framework for the operations segment of the Telesat LEO satellite constellation. The operations segment is responsible for connecting the overall LEO system by directing the other system components cooperate to deliver the service. The framework seeks to support security compliance-by-design and help developers trace security compliance requirements to the design of the operations segment so that they can easily show where and how such requirements are satisfied. This support can provide a competitive advantage and help solidify Telesat’s position as a Canadian leader in LEO satellite communications.

, Ottawa ON, Canada
Partner Institution: 
November 2021 – October 2023

System-Level Security for IoT-enabled e-Health Systems

The evolution of e-health systems with increased connectivity through the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) has exposed them to a new frontier of cybersecurity vulnerabilities from which they were previously shielded. Healthcare providers today depend on nearly 100 million connected medical devices to deliver cost-effective and lifesaving treatment to patients, and the number of these connected devices is expected to double in the next 2-3 years. The primary goal of this work is to develop a comprehensive system-level security platform, capable of guaranteeing acceptable levels of security, privacy, and trust in a heterogeneous IoT-enabled e-health system. We aim to develop a system-level security management platform that can help to identify vulnerabilities in a heterogeneous e-health system and inform the development of suitable security mechanisms and protocols.

This project is funded through the  led by Defence Research and Development Canada’s Centre for Security Science (DRDC CSS), in partnership with Public Safety Canada.

, Centre for Security Science (DRDC CSS), Ottawa ON, Canada
Collaborators: Mohamed Ibnkahla (�Ӱ�ԭ�� University),  (�Ӱ�ԭ�� University)
April 2019 – March 2022

Protection of critical infrastructure is rapidly growing as one of the most important areas of cybersecurity. The primary goal of this project is to design and develop critical infrastructure cybersecurity assessment methodologies and associated modelling and simulation environments. We are working on a rigorous, formal methods-based approach for identifying and analyzing the existence of implicit component interactions in critical infrastructure systems. Our goal is to provide a formal understanding of how and why implicit interactions can exist in distributed systems, such as those commonly found in critical infrastructures. Additionally, the methods we are developing can identify deficiencies in important existing system components, allowing for better assessment of the risks being taken by using such components in critical systems.

, University of Illinois, Urbana IL, USA

January 2016 – June 2022

Validating the Effectiveness of Security Design Patterns

Security design patterns have been proposed for mitigating security threats at early stages of software design. However, approaches for verifying and validating that using a security design pattern mitigates a particular threat, or class of threats, and improves system security, do not currently exist. This research project aims to close this gap in the research by developing approaches for: (1) detecting security threats targeting communication channels in the architectural design of distributed software systems, and (2) analyzing, verifying, and validating the effectiveness of security design patterns for mitigating detected security threats and improving system security at design-time.

, �Ӱ�ԭ�� University, Ottawa ON, Canada
September 2018 – August 2019

Assurance Cases for Security and Resilience of Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Smart energy grids depend on advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) and enormous amounts of information collected and used to make important decisions related to energy services including billing, monitoring, distribution, load balancing, and more. Therefore, ensuring the confidentially, integrity, and availability of this information is paramount. However, proving that AMI is secure, and that it is acceptably resilient is a difficult task. In this project, we seek to establish the ground work required for the development of assurance case templates for security and resilience properties of AMI. We aim to form the foundation for ongoing research in the development of assurance cases for security and resilience of critical infrastructure. Our goal is to take the important first step towards developing a more holistic and comprehensive approach for ensuring the security and resilience of critical infrastructures. Having a systematic way in which we can assure that providers of AMI have done their due diligence in protecting against, and planning for, potential compromise or failure of their systems, and the components from which they are built, can advance and enhance cybersecurity assurance in the complex distributed systems that are now a part of so many critical infrastructures. This will ultimately provide valuable and insightful information regarding how to mitigate the security vulnerabilities and risks, and how to reduce the impact when a system experiences an attack or failure.

, Ottawa ON, Canada
February 2018 – March 2018