Pub Crawl #49
Pub Crawl summarizes, by hard problems, sets of publications that have been peer reviewed and presented at SoS conferences or referenced in current work. The topics are chosen for their usefulness for current researchers. Select the topic name to view the corresponding list of publications. Submissions and suggestions are welcome.
Anonymous Messaging 2020 (all)
Anonymous messages contain embedded information about where to send them next. In theory, message strings can become untraceable, and anonymity maintained. This is a double-edged issue, offering security and privacy on the one hand and creating an attribution problem on the other. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the problems of resiliency and scalability.
Artificial Intelligence Security 2020 (all)
John McCarthy, coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" in 1955 and defined it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." (as quoted in Poole, Mackworth & Goebel, 1998) AI research is highly technical and specialized, and has been characterized as "deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other." (McCorduck, Pamela (2004), Machines Who Think (2nd ed.) These divisions are attributed to both technical and social factors. For the Science of Security community, AI research has implications for resilience, composability, metrics, and human behavior.
Artificial Neural Networks 2020 (all)
Artificial neural networks have been used to solve a wide variety of tasks that are hard to solve using ordinary rule-based programming. What has attracted much interest in neural networks is the possibility of learning. Tasks such as function approximation, classification pattern and sequence recognition, anomaly detection, filtering, clustering, blind source separation and compression and controls all have security implications. Cyber physical systems, resiliency, policy-based governance and metrics are the Science of Security interests.
Keeping the attack surface as small as possible is a basic security measure. That attack surface is the sum of the different points where an adversary or unauthorized user can attempt to access in order to try to enter data to or extract data. For the Science of Security community, attack surface is a key concept for scalability, resilience, and metrics.
Attack vectors are paths or means by which an adversary can gain access to a computer or network server to deliver malware. Attack vectors enable exploitation of system vulnerabilities, including the human element. For the Science for Security community, this problem is related to resiliency and scalability, as well as human behavior.
Attestation is the verification of changes to software as part of trusted computing. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to composability, resilience, and human behavior.
Attribution of the source of an attack or the author of malware is a continuing problem in computer forensics. For the Science of Security community, it is an important issue related to human behavior, metrics, and composability.
Big Data Security in the Cloud 2020 (all)
Big data security in the Cloud is a growing area of interest for cybersecurity researchers. The work presented here ranges from cyber-threat detection in critical infrastructures to privacy protection. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to the hard problems of resilience, scalability, and metrics.
Big Data Security Metrics 2020 (all)
Measurement is a hard problem in the Science of Security. Applied to Big Data, the problems of measurement in security systems are compounded. Scalability and resilience are also impacted.
Blockchain Security 2020 (all)
The blockchain is the “public ledger” of all Bitcoin transactions. It is a so-called “trustless” proof mechanism of all the transactions on the network. Access to it is public. Since the blockchain is the record of all Bitcoin transactions, it has a special need for security. For the Science of Security community, research into this problem is related to resiliency and scalability.
Web browsers are vulnerable to a range of threats. To the Science of Security community, they are often the first vector for attacks and are relevant to the issues of compositionality, resilience, predictive metrics, and human behavior.
Memory corruption attacks account for many security breaches afflicting software systems. Return-oriented programming (ROP) techniques are often used to bypass the most common memory protection systems. For the Science of Security community, this research is related to resilience, scalability, composability and human factors.
Router Systems Security 2020 (all)
Routers are among the most ubiquitous electronic devices in use. Basic security from protocols and encryption can be readily achieved, but routing has many leaks. For the Science of Security community, they are related to the hard problems of resiliency and predictive metrics.
Coding standards encourage programmers to follow a set of uniform rules and guidelines determined by the requirements of the project and organization, rather than by the programmer's personal familiarity or preference. Developers and software designers apply these coding standards during software development to create secure systems. The development of secure coding standards is a work in progress by security researchers, language experts, and software developers. The articles cited here cover topics related to the Science of Security hard problems of resilience, metrics, human factors, and policy-based governance.
Sandboxing is an important tool for the Science of Security, particularly with regard to developing composable systems and policy-governed systems. To many researchers, it is a promising method for preventing and containing damage. Sandboxing, frequently used to test unverified programs that may contain malware, allows the software to run without harming the host device.
SCADA Systems Security 2020 (all)
SCADA system security issues have been identified as a problem for more than a decade. The work cited here addresses the issue relevant to the Science of Security hard problems of resiliency, compositionality, and human behavior.
Scalability is one of the hard problems in the Science of Security. Applied to larger data sets, increases in interoperability, and greater computing capacity, particularly in critical infrastructures and the Internet of Things, the development of effective automated scalable systems is compounded.
Scalable Verification 2020 (all)
Verification of software and its security features can be done statically or dynamically. A challenge is to conduct verifications at scale to determine whether all the features do what they are intended to do. For the Science of Security community, scalable verification relates to scalability and compositionality, resilience, and predictive metrics.
Science of Security 2019 (all)
Many more articles and research studies are appearing with “Science of Security” as a keyword. The articles cited here discuss the degree to which security is a science and various issues surrounding its development, ranging from basic approach to essential elements. The articles cited here address the fundamental concepts of the Science of Security.
Secure File Sharing 2020 (all)
Data leakage while file sharing continues to be a major problem for cybersecurity, especially with the advent of cloud storage. Secure file sharing is relevant to the Science of Security community hard topics of resilience, composability, metrics, and human behavior.
Security by Default 2020 (all)
One of the broad goals of the Science of Security project is to understand more fully the scientific underpinnings of cybersecurity. With this knowledge, the potential for developing systems that, if following these scientific principles, are presumed secure. In the meantime, security by default remains a topic of interest and some research. For the Science of Security community, this work relates directly to scalability and resilience.
Measurement and metrics are one of the five hard problems in the Science of Security.
Policy-based access controls and security policies are intertwined in most commercial systems. Analytics use abstraction and reduction to improve policy-based security. For the Science of Security community, policy-based governance is one of the five Hard Problems.
Visible Light Communications Security 2020 (all)
Visible light communication (VLC) offers an unregulated and free light spectrum and potentially could be a solution for overcoming overcrowded radio spectrum, especially for wireless communication systems, and doing it securely. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to resiliency, scalability, and metrics.
Vulnerability Detection 2020 (all)
Vulnerability detection is a topic for which a great deal of research is being done. For the Science of Security community, vulnerability detection research is relevant to human behavior, resiliency, compositionality, and metrics.
The proliferation of personal wearable devices to track athletic performance and their adaptation and adaptation for health monitoring presents challenges for security. The small processing power and storage and the potential for compromise have stimulated research. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to the hard problems of human behavior and privacy, resiliency, and scalability.
Web Browser Security 2020 (all)
Web browsers are vulnerable to a range of threats. To the Science of Security community, they are often the first vector for attacks and are relevant to the issues of compositionality, resilience, predictive metrics, and human behavior.
Web caches offer a potential for mischief. With the expanded need for caching capability with the cloud and mobile communications, the need for more and better security has also grown. This research is relevant to the Science of Security hard problems of resilience, scalability, and metrics.
The creation of trust across networks is an important aspect of cybersecurity. Much of current research is focusing on graph theory as a means to develop a “web of trust.” For the Science of Security community, resiliency and composability are related hard problems.
White Box Cryptography 2020 (all)
Open devices such as PCs, tablets or smartphones are extremely vulnerable to attacks, since the attacker has complete control over the execution platform and the software implementation itself in the form of a white box attack. The goal of white-box encryption is to create a successful cryptographic algorithm so that assets remain secure even while under white-box attacks. For the Science of Security community, the subject is relevant to composability, resilience, and metrics.
Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests for removal via email of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the URL of the specific citation in your correspondence.
Pub Crawl contains bibliographical citations, abstracts if available, links on specific topics, and research problems of interest to the Science of Security community.
How recent are these publications?
These bibliographies include recent scholarly research on topics that have been presented or published within the stated year. Some represent updates from work presented in previous years; others are new topics.
How are topics selected?
The specific topics are selected from materials that have been peer reviewed and presented at SoS conferences or referenced in current work. The topics are also chosen for their usefulness for current researchers.
How can I submit or suggest a publication?
Researchers willing to share their work are welcome to submit a citation, abstract, and URL for consideration and posting, and to identify additional topics of interest to the community. Researchers are also encouraged to share this request with their colleagues and collaborators.
What are the hard problems?
Select a hard problem to retrieve related publications.
- - Scalability and Composability: Develop methods to enable the construction of secure systems with known security properties from components with known security properties, without a requirement to fully re-analyze the constituent components.
- - Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration: Develop methods to express and enforce normative requirements and policies for handling data with differing usage needs and among users in different authority domains.
- - Security Metrics Driven Evaluation, Design, Development, and Deployment: Develop security metrics and models capable of predicting whether or confirming that a given cyber system preserves a given set of security properties (deterministically or probabilistically), in a given context.
- - Resilient Architectures: Develop means to design and analyze system architectures that deliver required service in the face of compromised components.
- - Understanding and Accounting for Human Behavior: Develop models of human behavior (of both users and adversaries) that enable the design, modeling, and analysis of systems with specified security properties.