Understanding Effects of Norms and Policies on the Robustness, Liveness, and Resilience of Systems - January 2016

Public Audience
Purpose: To highlight project progress. Information is generally at a higher level which is accessible to the interested public. All information contained in the report (regions 1-3) is a Government Deliverable/CDRL.

PI(s):  Emily Berglund, Jon Doyle, Munindar Singh
Researchers:  Hongying Du, Bennett Y. Narron, Nirav Ajmeri

HARD PROBLEM(S) ADDRESSED

• Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration - Norms provide a standard of correctness for collaborative behavior, with respect to which policies of the participants can be evaluated individually or in groups.
• Resilient Architectures - The study of robustness and resilience of systems modeled in terms of norms would provide a basis for understanding resilient social architectures.

PUBLICATIONS
 

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

• We have refined our conceptual model of norms and sanctions pertaining to cybersecurity. This model provides a basis for capturing our assumptions and helping identify elements of our empirical study (with users) and the game to be used as testbed for the study.
• We have developed a preliminary experiment design, based on performance in a computer security game, for a study of norms relevant to cybersecurity in a work environment.  The experiment seeks to assess the impact of different types of sanctions (informal or formal, by peers or by administrators, to individuals or entire groups) in encouraging desired security practices.
• We have enhanced the implementation of our computer game (initiated in the previous quarter) to improve its functionality for our proposed experiment. We have conducted a preliminary test of the computer game with participants to identify potential problems before conducting the actual experimental rounds.