HotSoS 2015 Tutorials

The tutorials described below were presented at HotSoS 2015. The HotSoS conference page is available at: http://cps-vo.org/group/hotsos.

Tutorial 1: “Social Network Analysis for Science of Security,” Kathleen Carley, Carnegie Mellon University

The tutorial provided a brief introduction to the area of network science, covering analytics and visualization. Dr. Carley described the core ideas, most common metrics, critical theories, and an overview of key tools. She drew illustrative examples from three security-related issues: insider threat analysis, resilient organizational designs, and global cyber-security attacks.

Tutorial 2: “Understanding and Accounting for Human Behavior,” Sean Smith, Dartmouth College and Jim Blythe, University of Southern California

Since computers are machines, it's tempting to think of computer security as purely a technical problem. However, computing systems are created, used, and maintained by humans and exist to serve the goals of human and institutional stakeholders. Consequently, effectively addressing the security problem requires understanding this human dimension. The presenters discussed this challenge and the principal research approaches to it.

Tutorial 3: “Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration,” Munindar Singh, North Carolina State University

The envisioned Science of Security can be understood as a systemic body of knowledge with theoretical and empirical underpinnings that inform the engineering of secure information systems. The presentation addressed the underpinnings pertaining to the hard problem of secure collaboration, approaching cybersecurity from a sociotechnical perspective and understanding systems through the interplay of human behavior with technical architecture on the one hand and social architecture on the other. The presentation emphasized the social architecture and modeled it in terms of a formalization based on organizations and normative relationships. Dr. Singh described how norms provide a basis for specifying security requirements at a high level, a basis for accountability, and a semantic basis for trust. He concluded the presentation by providing some directions and challenges for future research, including formalization and empirical study.

Tutorial 4: “Security-Metrics-Driven Evaluation, Design, Development and Deployment”, William Sanders, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Making sound security decisions when designing, operating, and maintaining a complex system is a challenging task. Analysts need to be able to understand and predict how different factors affect overall system security. During system design, security analysts want to compare the security of multiple proposed system architectures. After a system is deployed, analysts want to determine where security enhancement should be focused by examining how the system is most likely to be successfully penetrated. Additionally, when several security enhancement options are being considered, analysts would like to evaluate the relative merit of each. In each of these scenarios, quantitative security metrics should provide insight on system security and aid security decisions. The tutorial provided a survey of existing quantitative security evaluation techniques and described new work being done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in this field.

Tutorial 5: “Resilient Architectures,” Ravishankar Iyer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Resilience brings together experts in security, fault tolerance, human factors, and high integrity computing for the design and validation of systems that are expected to continue to deliver critical services in the event of attacks and failures. The tutorial highlighted issues and challenges in designing systems that are resilient to both malicious attacks and accidental failures, provided both cyber and cyber-physical examples, and concluded by addressing the challenges and opportunities from both a theoretical and practical perspective.

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