Queen's University

<p><strong>Overview</strong></p>
<p>Founded in 1841, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario is one of Canada’s leading research-intensive institutions, combining quality and intensity in research with excellence in undergraduate and graduate education.</p>
<p>Research is a core component of the mission of Queen’s University. A member of the U15, a group of Canada’s leading research-intensive universities, Queen’s ranks highly in terms of research funding and research intensity amongst universities nationally.</p>
<p>Their commitment to research excellence is evident in the many exceptional national and international accolades awarded to their researchers, most recently Queen’s Professor Emeritus Dr. Arthur B. McDonald was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics – with co-recipient Takaaki Kajita of Japan – in Stockholm, Sweden.</p>
<p>This excellence, found across disciplines – from health care, the environment, materials, energy, law, economics, culture, and many others – attracts the best students, the best faculty, and the best collaborators from local and global communities, other institutions, government, and industry.</p>
<p>Through their diverse programs, Queen’s university promotes social innovation, fosters creative expression, and explores how societies work best. And it’s this culture of excellence that has made Queen’s one of Canada’s leading research universities.</p>
<p><strong>Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation</strong></p>
<p>The Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) team supports the advancement of partnerships, research collaborations, and knowledge mobilization as well as innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development. The QPI team develops and facilitates partnerships with industry, governments, not-for-profit organizations, and other academic institutions to advance the research enterprise at Queen’s and the commercialization of inventions, and to strengthen the regional innovation ecosystem in Kingston and Eastern Ontario. </p>
<p>With support from external funding, the QPI team offers numerous services, resources and programs to support entrepreneurs, including those from Queen’s, and to accelerate the growth of startups and small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within Kingston and Eastern Ontario. The team has transformed more than 1,000 invention disclosures into hundreds of technologies covered by at least one patent; additionally, the team has supported the founding and-or acceleration of hundreds of startups and SMEs in the Kingston region.</p>


<h1 id="background">Background</h1>
<p>Cloud computing enables ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand access to shared pools computing resources that can reduce capital costs, increase flexibility and enable users to capitalize on economies of scale. However, security threats remain a major risk to adoption. Traditional security protocols that protect cloud communications are not efficient at handling new and fast evolving security issues including authentication, data-in-transit security, man-in-the-middle attacks, sensitive information disclosure, replay, compromised-key, repudiation, and session hijacking attacks.</p>
<h1 id="technology-overview">Technology Overview</h1>
<p>Experts at Queen’s University have developed a novel high-performance secure cloud communication architecture to effectively mitigate communication threats between cloud entities, ensure security for data-in-transit and authenticity of cloud users and providers. Moreover, the architecture includes a high-performance cloud-focused security protocol which provides faster reconnection facility for supporting frequent connectivity and dealing with connection trade-offs. This protocol efficiently utilizes the strength and speed of symmetric block encryption, cryptographic hash, public key cryptography and ephemeral key-exchange mechanism. It ensures security for both the data and the cryptographic keys. The result is an efficient, fast and safe communication channel that outperforms traditional security protocols in performance and bandwidth consumption without significant impact on memory usage at the server side.</p>
<h1 id="benefits">Benefits</h1>
<ul>
<li>Architecture can efficiently mitigate various attacks on cloud communications including man-in-the-middle (e.g. eavesdropping, sniffing, identity spoofing, data tampering), sensitive information disclosure, re-play, compromised-key, repudiation and session hijacking attacks.</li>
<li>Architecture protects cloud communications with less negotiation and bandwidth overhead, more reasonable memory usage, and faster connectivity than the traditional security protocols (e.g. TLSv1.3).</li>
<li>It is applicable to both TCP and UDP-based communications and has no dependency on the SSL/TLS/DTLS implementations at any part of the communication channel. It can thus be easily integrated with any protocol or server system.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="applications">Applications</h1>
<ul>
<li>Cloud communications</li>
<li>Cloud computing</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="opportunity">Opportunity</h1>
<p>Queen’s University is seeking companies interested in licensing, implementing  and/or commercializing this technology.</p>
