Pub Crawl #33
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.
6LoWPAN, IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks, is an architecture intended to allow low power devices to participate in the Internet of Things. The IEEE specification allows for operation in either a secure or non-secure mode. For the Science of Security community, the creation of secure process in low power and ad hoc environments relates to the hard problems of resilience and composability. In the IoT context, it also relates to cyber-physical system security.
Acoustic couplers such as modems bridge the gap between analog voice and electronic communications. At this interface, there is a security gap. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to security of cyber-physical systems and to the hard problems of resilience, human, behavior, and scalability.
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.
Differential Privacy 2018 (all)
The theory of differential privacy is an active research area, and there are now differentially private algorithms for a wide range of problems. This research looks at big data and cyber physical systems, as well as theoretic approaches. For the Science of Security community, differential privacy relates to composability and scalability, resiliency, and human behavior.
A digital signature is one of the most common ways to authenticate. Using a mathematical scheme, the signature assures the reader that the message was created and sent by a known sender. But not all signature schemes are secure. The research challenge is to find new and better ways to protect, transfer, and utilize digital signatures. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to scalability and resilience.
DNA-based cryptography is a developing interdisciplinary area combining cryptography, mathematical modeling, biochemistry and molecular biology as the basis for encryption. For the Science of Security committee, it is relevant to the hard problems of human behavior, resilience, predictive metrics, and privacy.
Efficient Encryption 2018 (all)
The term “efficient encryption” generally refers to the speed of an algorithm, that is, the time needed to complete the calculations to encrypt or decrypt a coded text. The research cited here shows a broader concept and looks both at hardware and software, as well as power consumption. The research relates to cyber physical systems, resilience and composability.
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.
Expert Systems and Privacy 2018 (all)
Expert systems have potential for efficiency, scalability, and economy in systems security. The research work cited here looks at the problem of privacy. For the Science of Security community, the work is relevant to scalability and human factors.
Expert Systems and Security 2018 (all)
An expert system is an artificial intelligence (AI) application that uses a knowledge base of human expertise for problem solving. Its success is based on the quality of the data and rules obtained from the human expert. Some perform above and some below the level of humans. For the Science of Security, expert systems are relevant to the hard problems of scalability, human behavior, and resilience.
Exponentiation, the mathematical operations that underlie encryption and coding, is important to the Science of Security because complexity adds delay. In creating resilient architectures, for example, slow processing may make a security feature too heavy to include. It is relevant to the hard problems of scalability and resiliency.
Facial recognition tools have long been the stuff of action-adventure films. In the real world, they present opportunities and complex problems being examined by researchers. For the Science of Security community, their work relates to the hard problems of human behavior, metrics, and resilience.
False Data Detection 2019 (all)
False data injection attacks against electric power grids potentially have major consequences. For the Science of Security community, the detection of false data injection is relevant to resiliency, composability, cyber physical systems, and human behavior.
Fog Computing and Security 2019 (all)
Fog computing is a concept that extends the Cloud concept to the end user. As with most new technologies, a survey of the scope and types of security problems is necessary. Much of this research relates to the Internet of Things. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to the hard problems of resilience and scalability.
Game Theoretic Security 2018 (all)
Game theory has historically been the province of social sciences such as economics, political science, and psychology. Game theory has developed into an umbrella term for the logical side of science that includes both human and non-human actors like computers. It has been used extensively in wireless networks research to develop understanding of stable operation points for networks made of autonomous/selfish nodes. The nodes are considered as the players. Utility functions are often chosen to correspond to achieved connection rate or similar technical metrics. In security, the computer game framework is used to anticipate and analyze intruder and administrator concurrent interactions within the network. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to human factors, predictive metrics, and scalability.
Homomorphic Encryption 2018 (all)
Homomorphic encryption shows promise, but continues to demand a heavy processing load in practice. Research into homomorphism is focused on creating greater efficiencies, as well as elaborating on the underlying theory. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to resiliency, scalability, human factors, and metrics.
Identity Management 2019 (all)
The term identity management refers to the management of individual identities, their roles, authentication, authorizations and privileges within or across systems. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to scalability, resilience, and human behavior.
Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Anomaly Detection 2019 (all)
Industrial control systems are a vital part of the critical infrastructure. Anomaly detection in these systems is requirement to successfully build resilient and scalable systems. The work cited here addresses these two hard problems in the Science of Security.
Information Assurance 2019 (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 2019 (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.
Insider threats are a difficult problem. The research cited here looks at both intentional and accidental threats, including the effects of social engineering, and methods of identifying potential threats. For the Science of Security, insider threat relates to human behavior, as well as metrics, policy-based governance and resilience.
Intrusion Detection Systems 2019 (all)
Intrusion detection systems defend communications, computer and other information systems against malicious attacks by identifying attacks and attackers. The topic relates to the Science of Security issues of resilience and composability.
Internet Protocol Version 6 is slowly being adopted as the replacement for version 4. Touted as a more secure protocol with increased address space, portability, and greater privacy, research into this and other related protocols has increased, particularly in the context of smart grid, mobile communications, and cloud computing. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to resiliency, composability, metrics, and policy-based governance.
Lightweight Ciphers 2019 (all)
Lightweight cryptography is a major research direction. The release of SIMON in June 2013 generated significant interest and a number of studies evaluating and comparing it to other cipher algorithms. To the Science of Security community, lightweight ciphers can support resilience and scalability, especially in cyber physical systems constrained with power and “weight” budgets.
Science of Security 2018 (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.
Wireless Mesh Networks 2019 (all)
With more than 70 protocols vying for preeminence over wireless mesh networks, the security problem is magnified. The work cited here relates to the Science of Security hard problems of resiliency, metrics, and composability.
Work Factor Metrics 2019 (all)
It is difficult to measure the relative strengths and weaknesses of modern information systems when the safety, security, and reliability of those systems must be protected. Developers often apply security to systems without the ability to evaluate the impact of those mechanisms to the overall system. Few efforts are directed at actually measuring the quantifiable impact of information assurance technology on the potential adversary. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to resilience and scalability.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become an area of interest in research community. Many state-of-the-art models for machine learning lack transparency and interpretability, a major drawback in many applications where the rationale for the model's decision is a requirement for trust. For the Science of Security community, XAI is relevant to resilience and scalability.
Zero Day Attacks and Defense 2019 (all)
Zero day attacks exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in software that programmers have not yet patched or fixed. For the Science of Security community, zero day exploits related to predictive metrics, resiliency, and composability.
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.