Qiang Ye

Over the past few years, machine learning has been widely utilized to enhance cybersecurity. In this talk, we will present two of our recent projects in this area: the use of autoencoders to defend against adversarial attacks and the detection of darknet traffic over Tor. In the first project, we observed that machine learning-based intrusion detection systems (IDSs) have become increasingly popular due to their strong detection capability and adaptability. However, these IDSs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in which small perturbations to input features can cause misclassification. Although autoencoders (AEs) have shown promise in mitigating adversarial attacks in computer vision, their potential for improving IDS robustness remains largely unexplored. In this project, we proposed a novel AE-based scheme for detecting adversarial network flows. In the second project, we found that the rapid growth of encrypted communication has strengthened user privacy but has also introduced challenges for network monitoring, cybersecurity, and digital forensics. Among anonymity technologies, Tor has gained significant popularity due to its ability to conceal user identity and traffic origins. While Tor serves legitimate privacy needs, it can also be exploited for cybercrime, command-and-control communication, and darknet marketplace access. Therefore, accurately distinguishing Tor traffic from regular Internet traffic is an important task in modern network security systems. In this project, we developed a state-of-the-art dataset for Tor traffic detection and evaluated the performance of machine learning-based detection schemes.

Biography:

Qiang Ye is a Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University, Canada. His current research focuses on network security, mobile and wireless networks, and machine learning. He has published numerous papers in top venues, such as IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON) and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (TWC). He has served as an Associate Editor for leading journals, including IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT) and IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking (TCCN). He has also served as a TPC Chair or Symposium Chair for a series of Tier-1 conferences, such as the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) and the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM). He was selected as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) for 2026–2027 and a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) for 2026–2027. He received his Ph.D. in Computing Science from the University of Alberta, Canada, in 2007. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.