Biblio

The human factor is often regarded as the weakest link in cybersecurity systems. The investigation of several security breaches reveals an important impact of human errors in exhibiting security vulnerabilities. Although security researchers have long observed the impact of human behavior, few improvements have been made in designing secure systems that are resilient to the uncertainties of the human element.

In this talk, we discuss several psychological theories that attempt to understand and influence the human behavior in the cyber world. Our goal is to use such theories in order to build predictive cyber security models that include the behavior of typical users, as well as system administrators. We then illustrate the importance of our approach by presenting a case study that incorporates models of human users. We analyze our preliminary results and discuss their challenges and our approaches to address them in the future.

Reliability block diagram (RBD) models are a commonly used reliability analysis method. For static RBD models, combinatorial solution techniques are easy and efficient. However, static RBDs are limited in their ability to express varying system state, dependent events, and non-series-parallel topologies. A recent extension to RBDs, called Dynamic Reliability Block Diagrams (DRBD), has eliminated those limitations. This tool paper details the RBD implementation in the M¨obius modeling framework and provides technical details for using RBDs independently or in composition with other M¨obius modeling formalisms. The paper explains how the graphical front-end provides a user-friendly interface for specifying RBD models. The back-end implementation that interfaces with the M¨obius AFI to define and generate executable models that the M¨obius tool uses to evaluate system metrics is also detailed.

Reliability block diagram (RBD) models are a commonly used reliability analysis method. For static RBD models, combinatorial solution techniques are easy and efficient. However, static RBDs are limited in their ability to express varying system state, dependent events, and non-series-parallel topologies. A recent extension to RBDs, called Dynamic Reliability Block Diagrams (DRBD), has eliminated those limitations. This tool paper details the RBD implementation in the M¨obius modeling framework and provides technical details for using RBDs independently or in composition with other M¨obius modeling formalisms. The paper explains how the graphical front-end provides a user-friendly interface for specifying RBD models. The back-end implementation that interfaces with the M¨obius AFI to define and generate executable models that the M¨obius tool uses to evaluate system metrics is also detailed.