Pub Crawl #46
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.
The need to understand adversarial behavior in light of new technologies is always important. Using models to understand their behavior is an important element in the Science of Security for addressing human behavior, scalability, resilience and metrics.
Air gaps—the physical separation of one computing system from another—is a classical defense mechanism based upon the assumption that data is safe if it cannot be touched electronically. However, air gaps may not be designed with adequate consideration for electronic emanations, thermal radiation, or other physical factors that might be exploited. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to the hard problems of composability, resilience, human behavior, and metrics.
The proliferation and increased capability of “smart phones” has also increased security issues for users. For the Science of Security community, these small computing platforms have the same hard problems to solve as main frames, data centers, or desktops. The research cited here looked at encryption issues specific to the Android operating system. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to scalability, human behavior, metrics, and resilience.
Minimizing privacy risk is one of the major problems in the development of social media and hand-held smart phone technologies, vehicle ad hoc networks, and wireless sensor networks. For the Science of Security community, the research issues addressed relate to the hard problems of resiliency, composability, metrics, and human behavior.
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 Site Scripting 2020 (all)
A type of computer security vulnerability typically found in Web applications, cross-site scripting (XSS) enables attackers to inject client-side script into Web pages viewed by other users. Attackers may use a cross-site scripting vulnerability to bypass access controls such as the same origin policy. Consequences may range from petty nuisance to significant security risk, depending on the value of the data handled by the vulnerable site and the nature of any security mitigation implemented by the site's owner. A frequent method of attack, research is being conducted on methods to prevent, detect, and mitigate XSS attacks. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the hard problems of human behavior, scalability, and resilience.
Cryptojacking is a method criminals are using to take over computers and using the hijacked processing power to earn cryptocurrency. For the Science of Security community, this new attack vector is relevant to resiliency, metrics, and human behavior.
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.
The ability to assess damage accurately and quickly is critical to resilience.
For security researchers, privacy protection during data mining is a major concern. Sharing information over the Internet or holding it in a database requires methods of sanitizing data so that personal information cannot be obtained. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to human behavior and privacy, resilience, and compositionality.
DDOS Attack Detection 2020 (all)
Distributed Denial of Service Attacks continue to be among the most prolific forms of attack against information systems. Detection is a key step in dealing the problem. For the Science of Security community, this research is related to the problems of resilience, composability, metrics, and human behavior.
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.
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.
Since the Bell System introduced “dynamic routing” several decades ago using the SS-7 signaling system, dynamic networks have been an important tool for network management and intelligence. For the Science of Security community, dynamic methods are useful toward the hard problems of resiliency, metrics, and composability.
Edge Detection and Security 2020 (all)
Edge detection is an important issue in image and signal processing. For the Science of Security community, the subject is relevant to issues in composability, scalability, predictive metrics, and resiliency.
Efficient Encryption 2020 (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.
Elliptic Curve Cryptography 2020 (all)
Elliptic curve cryptography is a major research area globally. It is relevant to solving the hard problems of interest to the Science of Security community of scalability, resilience, and metrics.
Homomorphic Encryption 2020 (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.
Honeypots are traps set up to detect, deflect, or in some manner, counteract attempts at unauthorized use of information systems. Generally, a honeypot consists of a computer, data, or a network site that appears to be part of a network, but is actually isolated and monitored, and which seems to contain information or a resource of value to attackers. With increased network size and complexity, the need for advanced methods is growing. Specifically, cloud and virtual security need advanced methods for malware detection and collection. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to resiliency, scalability, and human factors.
Human behavior is complex. That complexity creates a tremendous problem for cybersecurity. The works cited here address a range of human trust issues related to behaviors, deception, enticement, sentiment and other factors difficult to isolate and quantify. For the Science of Security community, human behavior is a Hard Problem.
Immersion systems, commonly known as “virtual reality”, are used for a variety of functions such as gaming, rehabilitation, and training. These systems mix the virtual with the actual, and have implications for cybersecurity because attackers may make the jump from virtual to actual systems. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to resilience, human factors, cyber physical systems, privacy, and composability.
Industrial Control Systems 2020 (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.
Neural Style Transfer 2020 (all)
Neural style transfer is receiving significant attention and showing results. One approach trains by defining and optimizing perceptual loss functions in feed-forward convolutional neural networks. Work in this area addresses security issues relative to AI and ML and the hard problems of scalability, resilience, and predictive metrics.
The proliferation of robots in the form of personal assistants, medical support devices, and other applications has heighted awareness of security issues with them. Of particular interest here is trust—the confidence the human has that the machine has not been compromised, nor the ones it has been linked to are compromised. For the Science of Security community, this relates to the hard problems of resilience and of human factors.
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.
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.