Special Session on Cybersecurity and Telecommunication

2nd Special Session on Cybersecurity and Telecommunication in the Era of AI

IEEE BigData 2026

December 14-17, 2026 • Phoenix, Arizona, USA

Overview

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping cybersecurity and telecommunications by enabling advanced orchestration, automation, and predictive defense over data streams of unprecedented scale. Modern mobile networks, Open RAN deployments, IoT ecosystems, and 5G/6G cores generate telemetry, logs, packet captures, and control-plane signals at volumes, velocities, and varieties that only data-intensive AI methods can exploit. At the same time, AI itself introduces new attack surfaces - adversarial inputs, model supply-chain risks, poisoned fine-tuning data, and prompt-injection attacks against LLM-based network copilots.

This special session focuses on the data-centric AI frontier in telecommunications and cybersecurity: how large-scale, multimodal network data can be leveraged to build trustworthy, resilient, and efficient communication infrastructures, and how AI systems deployed inside those infrastructures can themselves be secured. We welcome contributions that explicitly engage with the 5Vs of big data - Volume, Velocity, Variety, Value, and Veracity - in the context of modern networks.

This is the 2nd edition of the session, following the inaugural edition at IEEE BigData 2025. The session is open to researchers, graduate students, and industrial partners.

Aims of the Session

Bring together researchers, operators, and vendors to exchange experiences and results.
Surface current and emerging research directions at the intersection of big data, AI, cybersecurity, and telecommunications.
Improve personal, enterprise, national, and international awareness of AI-driven threats and defenses.
Provide a forum for presenting and discussing recent advancements and open problems.
Foster international collaboration among universities, industry, and institutions.

Topics of Interest

We invite original research contributions in (but not limited to) the following five clusters.

1. Foundation Models and LLMs for Telecom and Security

LLM-based NOC/SOC copilots and network assistants
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over 3GPP/O-RAN specifications and security playbooks
LLM-assisted root-cause analysis, incident triage, and forensic investigation
Agentic AI and multi-agent systems for autonomous cyber defense
Prompt injection, jailbreaking, and model supply-chain attacks against network copilots
Domain-adapted foundation models for telecom and cellular protocol data

2. Large-Scale AI for Network and Threat Analytics

Streaming analytics over high-velocity network telemetry (NetFlow, PCAP, CDRs, RAN KPIs)
Multimodal learning across heterogeneous network data sources
Predictive threat analytics and AI-driven threat intelligence at operator scale
AI-powered Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) for telecom
Self-healing, self-adaptive, and intent-based network security
Federated and split learning across operators and edge nodes for privacy-preserving defense
Continuous-authentication and behavioral-biometric ML at telecom scale

3. Securing AI-Native Networks: O-RAN, Network Digital Twins, 5G/6G

O-RAN and Open RAN security: xApps, rApps, RIC threats, and E2-interface exploitation
Network Digital Twins (NDT) and DT-RAN for security testing, SSLA assurance, and ML training
Zero-trust architectures for disaggregated and cloud-native 5G/6G cores
AI-driven network optimization, slicing, and dynamic resource allocation with security guarantees
Secure edge computing and decentralized network architectures
Predictive maintenance and anomaly detection for large-scale telecom infrastructures

4. Emerging Paradigms: Semantic Communications, ISAC, NTN, Quantum-Safe

Semantic and goal-oriented communications for 6G, and their security implications
Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC): privacy, data governance, and new attack surfaces
Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN), LEO satellite constellations, and terrestrial/NTN handover security
Post-quantum cryptography migration in telecom signaling and user-plane protocols
Blockchain and AI convergence for distributed trust in future networks
IoT-scale connectivity management and secure intelligent routing

5. Trustworthy AI in Telecom: Robustness, Privacy, and Governance

Adversarial robustness of ML models deployed in network defense
Data poisoning, backdoor attacks, and veracity challenges in telecom ML pipelines
Explainable AI (XAI) for security decisions and human-in-the-loop operations
Privacy-preserving AI: differential privacy, homomorphic encryption, secure multi-party computation
AI ethics, bias, and fairness in cybersecurity decision-making
Regulatory frameworks (EU AI Act, NIS2, sector-specific rules) and compliance automation
Data sovereignty, privacy laws, and cross-border data governance in AI-driven telecom

Submission Information

Papers should be submitted as a PDF in 2-column IEEE format. Detailed instructions for authors can be found on the conference website. Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. All accepted papers must be presented by one of the authors at the conference to be included in the proceedings.

Important Dates

The important dates for this special session are:

Conference Dates: Dec 14-17, 2026
Camera-ready Papers & Pre-registration: Nov 14, 2026, 11:59 PM PST
Notification of Acceptance: Nov 1, 2026
Full Paper Submission Deadline: Sept 27, 2026, 11:59 PM PST

Session Organizers

Dr. Kasim Oztoprak (Session Chair)
Department of Computer Engineering
Konya Food and Agriculture University, Turkey
Email: kasim.oztoprak@gmail.com, kasim.oztoprak@gidatarim.edu.tr

Dr. Reza Hassanpour (Co-Chair)
Computer Science Department
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Email: r.zare.hassanpour@rug.nl

For any questions about this special session, please contact the organizers at the addresses above.