Case Study: Communications Security Establishment achieves large-scale cyberattack simulation and advanced cybersecurity research with Amazon Web Services

Communications Security Establishment with University of New Brunswick Uses AWS to Drive Innovative Cybersecurity Research

The Communications Security Establishment (CSE), Canada’s national cryptologic agency, partnered with the University of New Brunswick’s Canadian Institute for Cybersecurity to address a shortage of modern, non-sensitive datasets for cybersecurity research. Both organizations also lacked the large-scale compute capacity needed to simulate realistic enterprise attacks—hundreds of virtual machines—to test and develop new detection methods.

Using AWS (backed by $80,000 in Cloud Credits for Research) and Amazon EC2, they deployed 100+ virtual servers to simulate a 500‑PC company, ran 13 attack scenarios over 10 days, captured network traffic and logs, and published the resulting dataset on an AWS-hosted open portal. The effort provided rapid, cost-predictable scalability, improved detection of DDoS, infiltration, and web attacks, and produced datasets now cited by hundreds of researchers worldwide.

Communications Security Establishment

Mike Davie

Cybersecurity Engineer