Pub Crawl #25
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.
Big Data Security in the Cloud 2018 (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 2018 (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.
Biometric Encryption 2018 (all)
The use of biometric encryption to control access and authentication is well established. New concerns about privacy create new issues for biometric encryption, however. The increased use of Cloud architectures compounds the problem of providing continuous re-authentication. The research cited here examines these issues. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to resilience, scalability, and metrics.
Bitcoin is the allegedly secure electronic currency used for both open and nefarious purposes such as ransomware transactions. It does have security issues, however. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to human behavior and scalability.
Black Box Encryption 2018 (all)
Black box encryption is “security of a cryptographic algorithm is studied in the 'black-box' model: e.g., for symmetric encryption, the attacker is given access to a "device" which runs the encryption algorithm with a given key, and can submit plaintexts and ciphertexts, the goal of the attacker being to be able to decrypt a given block without submitting that exact block as ciphertext.” For the Science of Security community, back box cryptography is important to composability, metrics, and resilience.
Blockchain Security 2018 (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.
Bluetooth is a standard for short-range wireless interconnection of cellular phones, computers, and other electronic devices. In common use, it is important to the Science of Security because of its relevance to human behavior, resilient architectures, cyber physical systems, and composability.
Botnets, a common security threat, are used for a variety of attacks: spam, distributed denial of service (DDOS), ad and spyware, scareware and brute forcing services. Their reach and the challenge of detecting and neutralizing them is compounded in the cloud and on mobile networks. For the Science of Security community, research in this area is related to resiliency, compositionality, and metrics.
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.
CAPTCHA (the acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) technology has become a standard security tool. In the research presented here, some novel uses are presented, including use of Captchas as graphical passwords, motion-based captchas, and defeating a captcha using a gaming technique. For the Science of Security community, they are relevant to human behavior and composability.
Adversaries look for ways to combine multiple exploits into one large attack. To be effective, the attacker must think outside the box, know many different technologies, and chain together a number of attacks to achieve his goal. For the Science of Security community, such attacks relate to the hard problems of scalability and resilience.
Self-healing Networks 2018 (all)
Self-healing networks are an important goal for cyber physical systems. Resiliency and composability are essential elements.
Cyber physical system security requires the need to build secure sensors and actuators. The research work here addresses the Science of Security hard problems of human behavior, resiliency, metrics and composability for actuator security.
Signal Processing Security 2018 (all)
Broadly speaking, signal processing covers signal acquisition and reconstruction, quality improvement, signal compression and feature extraction. Each of these processes introduces vulnerabilities into communications and other systems. The research articles cited here explore trust between networks, steganalysis, tracing passwords across networks, and certificates. They address the Science of Security hard problems related to privacy, resilience, metrics, and composability.
Signature Based Defense 2018 (all)
Research into the use of malware signatures to inform defensive methods is a standard research exercise for the Science of Security community. This work addresses issues related to scalability and resilience.
Situational Awareness 2018 (all)
Situational awareness is an important human factor for cyber security that impacts resilience, predictive metrics, and composability.
Concerns about consumer privacy and electric power usage have impacted utilities fielding of smart-meters. Securing power meter readings in a way that addresses while protecting consumer privacy is a concern of research designed to help alleviate those concerns. For the Science of Security community, privacy is a core topic.
Smart Grid Security 2018 (all)
The primary value of published research in smart grid technologies--the use of cyber-physical systems to coordinate the generation, transmission, and use of electrical power and its sources-- is because of its strategic importance and the consequences of intrusion. Smart grid is of particular importance to the Science of Security and its problems embrace several of the hard problems, notably resiliency, scalability, 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.