Pub Crawl #34
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.
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.
Successful key management is critical to the security of any cryptosystem. It is perhaps the most difficult part of cryptography including as it does system policy, user training, organizational and departmental interactions, and coordination between all of these elements and includes dealing with the generation, exchange, storage, use, and replacement of keys, key servers, cryptographic protocols, and user procedures. For researchers, key management is a challenge to create larger scale and faster systems to operate within the cloud and other complex environments, while ensuring validity and not adding weight to the process. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to scalability, resilience, metrics, and human behavior.
Keystrokes are a basis for behavioral biometrics. The rhythms and patterns of the individual user can become the basis for a unique biological identification. Research into this area of computer security is growing. For the Science of Security, keystroke analysis is relevant to the hard problems of human behavior factors and predictive metrics.
Machine learning offers potential efficiencies and is an important tool in data mining. However, the “learned” or derived data must maintain integrity. Machine learning can also be used to identify threats and attacks. Research in this field relates to the Science of Security hard problems of resilient architectures, composability, and privacy.
Microelectronics Security 2019 (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 2019 (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.
Multicore Computing Security 2019 (all)
As high performance computing has evolved into larger and faster computing solutions, new approaches to security have been identified. The articles cited here focus on security issues related to multicore environments. Multicore computing relates to the Science of Security hard topics of scalability, resilience, and metrics.
Multifactor Authentication 2019 (all)
Multifactor authentication is of general interest within cryptography. For the Science of Security community, it relates to human factors, resilience, and metrics.
Security Risk Management 2019 (all)
Managing security risk in cyberphysical systems is a complex process. The work cited here approaches the problem relative to the Science of Security hard problems of human factors, scalability, resilience, and metrics.
Scalability, along with compositionality, is one of the five hard problems for the Science of Security community.
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.
Self-healing Networks 2019 (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 sensor security.
Signal Processing Security 2019 (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.
Situational Awareness 2019 (all)
Situational awareness is an important human factor for cyber security that impacts resilience, predictive metrics, and composability.
Self-healing Networks 2019 (all)
Self-healing networks are an important goal for cyber physical systems. Resiliency and composability are essential elements.
Smart Grid Security 2019 (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.
Sensors represent are both a point of vulnerability in the Smart Grid and a means of detection of intrusions. For the Science of Security community, research work into these industrial control systems is relevant to resiliency, compositionality, and human factors.
Agent-based modeling of human social behavior is an increasingly important research area. Efficient, scalable and robust social systems are difficult to engineer, both from the modeling perspective and the implementation perspective. The work cited here addresses these problems. It is relevant to the Science of Security community relative to human factors and scalability.
Software assurance is an essential element in the development of scalable and composable systems. For a complete system to be secure, each subassembly must be secure.
Spam detection is a general problem in cybersecurity. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to the problems of scalability, human behavior, and metrics.
SQL injection is used to attack data-driven applications. Malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution to dump the database contents to the attacker. One of the most common hacker techniques, SQL injection is used to exploit security vulnerabilities in an application's software. It is mostly used against websites but can be used to attack any type of SQL database. Because of its prevalence and ease of use from the hacker perspective, it is an important area for research and of interest to the Science of Security community relative to human behavior, metrics, resiliency, privacy and policy-based governance.
The Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is designed to ensure the security of electronic transactions and the exchange of sensitive information through cryptographic keys and certificates. Several SSL trust models are proposed in the literature to model trust relationship and trust propagation. The research cited here looks at several of those models, particularly in the area of ad hoc networks. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the hard problems of resiliency, scalability, human behavior, and metrics.
Static Code Analysis 2019 (all)
Static code is a standard method of testing software prior to production and marketing. Much of the work done in the Science of Security to look at code suggests that these analyses need to address security issues. Methods and practices cited in the research referenced here relate to human behavior, composability, and resiliency.
Steganography Detection 2019 (all)
Digital steganography detection is one of the primary areas or science of security research. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to the hard problems are privacy, metrics and composability.
Stylometry is a method of tracking user behavior across platforms and using techniques such as writing style and keystrokes. If holds some promise as a tool for insider threat detection. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to human behavior issues and predictive metrics.
Supply Chain Risk Assessment 2019 (all)
Threats to the supply chain in terms of delivery, integrity, content and the provenance of components and parts appear to be growing. The research cited here looks at methods to analyze risk to the security of the supply chain from multiple perspectives in order to develop accurate predictive metrics.
Support Vector Machines 2019 (all)
The Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm has been used to analyze data for classification and to perform regression analysis. For the Science of Security community, SVM is related to machine learning and relevant to solving the hard problems of composability, resilience and predictive metrics.
Swarm Intelligence is a concept using the metaphor of insect colonies to describe decentralized, self-organized systems. The method is often used in artificial intelligence, and there are about a dozen variants ranging from ant colony optimization to stochastic diffusion. For cybersecurity, these systems have significant value both offensively and defensively. For the Science of Security, swarm intelligence relates to composability and compositionality.
Taint analysis is an important method for analyzing software to determine possible paths for exploitation. As such, it relates to the problems of composability and metrics.
Vulnerability Detection 2019 (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 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.
White Box Cryptography 2019 (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.