Pub Crawl #56
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.
Acoustic Fingerprints 2021 (all)
Acoustic fingerprints can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database. As a security tool, fingerprints offer a modality of biometric identification of a user. Current research is exploring various aspects and applications, including the use of these fingerprints for mobile device security, antiforensics, use of image processing techniques, and client side embedding. For the Science of Security community, they are relevant to the problems of resiliency, human behavior and composability.
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.
As the power of digital signal processors has increased, adaptive filters are now routinely used in many devices as varied as mobile phones, printers, cameras, power systems, GPS devices, and medical monitoring equipment. An adaptive filter uses an optimization algorithm in a system with a linear filter to adjust parameters that have a transfer function controlled by a variable parameter. Because of the complexity of the optimization algorithms, most of these adaptive filters are digital filters. They are required for some applications because some parameters of the desired processing operation are not known in advance or are changing. The works cited here are articles about adaptive filtering as it relates to the Science of Security hard problems of scalability, resilience, and metrics.
Ad Hoc Network Security 2021 (all)
Security is an important research issue for ad hoc networks (MANETs). For the Science of Security community, this work relates to the hard problems of resilience, metrics, and compositionality.
Advanced Persistent Threat 2021 (all)
Advanced persistent threats are the subject of considerable research of interest to the Science of Security community. Research areas address the hard problems of human behavior, scalability, resilience, and metrics.
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.
Adversaries have an incentive to manipulate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to their advantage. One way is through a poisoning attack in which the adversary feeds carefully crafted poisonous data points into the training set. For the Science of Security community, poisoning attacks are relevant to the hard problems of scalability, resilience, and human behavior.
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.
Minimizing privacy risk is one of the major problems in the development of social media and hand-held smartphone 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.
Anonymous Messaging 2021 (all)
Anonymous messages contain embedded information about where to send them next. In theory, message strings can become untraceable, and anonymity maintained. This is a double-edged issue, offering security and privacy on the one hand and creating an attribution problem on the other. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the problems of resiliency and scalability.
Application Programming Interfaces, APIs, are definitions of interfaces to systems or modules. As code is reused, more and more are modified from earlier code. For the Science of Security community, the problems of compositionality and resilience are direct.
Science of Security 2020 (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.
Sensors represent 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.
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.
Tamper resistance is an important element for composability of software systems and for security of cyber physical system resilience. For the Science of Security community, it is also relevant to scalability, metrics, and human factors.
The term "text analytics" refers to linguistic, statistical, and machine learning techniques that model and structure the information content of textual sources for intelligence, exploratory data analysis, research, or investigation. The research cited here focuses on large volumes of text mined to identify insider threats, intrusions, and malware detection. It is of interest to the Science of Security community relative to metrics, scalability and composability, and human factors.
Theoretical Cryptography 2020 (all)
Cryptography can only exist if there is a mathematical hardness to it constructed to maintain a desired functionality, even under malicious attempts to change or destroy the prescribed functionality. The foundations of theoretical cryptography are the paradigms, approaches and techniques used to conceptualize, define and provide solutions to natural ``security concerns' mathematically using probability-based definitions, various constructions, complexity theoretic primitives and proofs of security. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the broad problem of developing a science, as well as contributing to the solution of the hard problems of composability and compositionality.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become an area of interest in the 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 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.