Pub Crawl #29
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.
Control Theory and Security 2018 (all)
In the Science of Security, control theory offers methods and approaches to potentially solve the Science of Security community hard problems in resiliency and composability.
A covert channel is a simple, effective mechanism for sending and receiving data between machines without alerting any firewalls or intrusion detectors on the network. In cybersecurity science, they have value both as a means for defense and attack. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the hard problems of resilience, scalability and compositionality.
Cross Layer Security 2018 (all)
Protocol architectures traditionally followed strict layering principles to ensure interoperability, rapid deployment, and efficient implementation. But a lack of coordination between layers limits the performance of these architectures. More important, the lack of coordination may introduce security vulnerabilities and potential threat vectors. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the problems of resiliency and composability.
Cryptology, the use of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversaries, is one of the primary subjects of the Science of Security and impacts study into all of the hard problems.
Physical systems, particularly critical infrastructure, are increasingly dependent upon cyber systems. Risks to those cyber systems create potential adverse consequences for the physical systems. Research exploring these problems is growing and is of interest to the Science of Security community relative to the hard problems of compositionality and scalability, human factors, resiliency, and metrics.
Mathematical decomposition is often used to address network flows. For the Science of Security community, decomposition is a useful method of dealing with cyber physical systems issues, metrics, and compositionality.
Deep Packet Inspection 2018 (all)
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.
The use of video for surveillance has created a need to be able to process very large volumes of data in very precise ways. Research into these methods is relevant to the Science of Security hard problems of scalability, resilience, and metrics.
Encryption audits not only test the validity and effectiveness of protection schemes, they also potentially provide data for developing and improving metrics about data security. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to helping solve the hard problems of predictive metrics, compositionality and resilience.
The expansion of a network to more nodes creates security problems. For the Science of Security community, expandability relates to resilience and compositionality.
If malware creates a trust situation which is not real, that is, false, a series of security issues are created. For the Science of Security community, this situation is relevant to policy-based governance, scalability, and resilience.
Information Assurance 2018 (all)
The term “information Assurance” was adopted in the late 1990’s to cover what is often now referred to generically as “cybersecurity.” Many still use the phrase, particularly in the U.S. government, both for teaching and research. Since it is a rather generic phrase, there is a wide area of coverage under this topic. As such, it touches all of the hard problems in the Science of Security.
Information Centric Networks 2018 (all)
The move from host-centric to information-centric network security has major implications for the Science of Security community relative to scalability and resilience.
Security is an important research issue for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). For the Science of Security community, this work relates to the hard problems of resilience, metrics, and compositionality.
Metadata Discovery Problem 2018 (all)
Metadata is often described as “data about data.” Usage varies from virtualization to data warehousing to statistics. Because of its volume and complexity, metadata has the potential to tax security procedures and processes. For the Science of Security community, work in this area is relevant to the problems of scalability, resilience, and compositionality.
Microelectronics Security 2018 (all)
Microelectronics is at the center of the IT world. Their security—provenance, integrity of their manufacture, and capacity for providing embedded security—is both an opportunity and a problem for cybersecurity research. For the Science of Security community, microelectronic security is a constituent component of resiliency, composability, and predictive metrics.
Moving Target Defense 2018 (all)
Moving Target Defense (MTD) research focuses on the presentation of a dynamic attack surface to an adversary, increasing the work factor necessary to successfully attack and exploit a cyber target. For the Science of Security community, MTD is related to scalability, resilience and predictive metrics.
The term “provable security” refers to those security methods which can be confirmed mathematically through a formal process. For the Science of Security community, these methods are important to solving the problems of resiliency, predictive metrics, and compositionality.
Provenance refers to information about the origin and activities of system data and processes. With the growth of shared services and systems, including social media, cloud computing, and service-oriented architectures, finding tamperproof methods for tracking files is a major challenge. Provenance is important to the Science of Security relative to human behavior, metrics, resilience, and composability.
Quick Response (QR) codes are used to store information in two dimensional grids which can be decoded quickly. The work here deals with extending its encoding and decoding implementation for user authentication and access control as well as tagging. For the Science of Security community, the work is relevant to cyber physical systems, cryptography, and resilience.
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.
Searchable Encryption 2018 (all)
Searchable encryption allows one to store encrypted data externally, but still allow for easy data searches that do not require the search to download everything before decrypting and to allow others to search data without having access to plaintext. As an application, it is becoming increasingly important in the Cloud environment. For the Science of Security community, it is an area of research related to cryptography, resilience, and composability.
Secure File Sharing 2018 (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 Risk Management 2018 (all)
Almost all of cybersecurity is a risk management process. Tradeoffs among level of security, overall performance, automation, weight, cost, and other factors can make risk management complicated. For the Science of Security, risk management is related to human factors and governance.
Security Weaknesses 2018 (all)
Attackers need only find one or a few exploitable vulnerabilities to mount a successful attack while defenders must shore up as many weaknesses as practicable. The research presented here covers a range of weaknesses and approaches for identifying and securing against attacks. Many articles focus on key systems, both public and private. Hard problems addressed include human behavior, policy-based governance, resilience and metrics.
Smart Grid Consumer Privacy 2018 (all)
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.
If there is no link between a pair of entities, no trust decision has yet been made. Operating in an unknown trust environment creates security problems related to scalability, policy-based governance, human factors, and resilience.
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.