I'm currently working on my proposal for my master's thesis and would like to find out which current research topics in the field of network security are promising/interesting/hot.
It may depend on your advisor area of expertise. These are some suggestions:
1. Dynamic network defense. Adaptive network security is interesting in which you can investigate coupling different detection systems or develop a model to maximize security.
Security is so wide that it touches almost all other technologies. The simple reason is that most systems are designed to work first before looking at how secure it is, i.e. absence of security by design. So before you venture into security, what is it that your are interested in? The security of these vulnerable systems or attacks directed at these systems? Then what systems are we talking about? IoT, SDN, Cloud Computing, SCADA/ICS, Internet, 5G, etc. You can look at mechanisms, methods and paradigms....access controls, secure protocols, cryptography, malware, Advanced Persistent Threats (APT) etc.
So, in a nutshell, first choose and area of security (and this is largely dependent on the one supervising you ), then choose what exactly you wanna address in that area of security, and what methods/mechanisms/approaches you will use to address the challenge. I know it's a mouthful, right! :)