NCSU SoS Lablet Research Methods, Community Development and Support - July 2017

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):  Jeff Carver, Ehab Al-Shaer, Lindsey McGowen, Laurie Williams, Jon Stallings, David Wright
Researchers: Mahran Al-Zyoud (UA), Lena Leonchuk

PROBLEM ADDRESSED

• Community Development - The goal is to build an extended and vibrant interdisciplinary community of science of security researchers, research methodologists, and practitioners (Carver, Williams).
• Community Resources - To create and maintain a repository of defensible scientific methods for security research (Carver, Williams).
• Oversight for the Application of Defensible Scientific Research Methodologies - To encourage the application of scientifically defensible research through various methods of consultation and feedback (Carver).
• Usable Data Sharing - To enable open, efficient, and secure sharing of data and experimental results for experimentation among SoS researchers (Al-Shaer).

PUBLICATIONS
Report papers written as a result of this research. If accepted by or submitted to a journal, which journal. If presented at a conference, which conference.

• Burcham, Morgan, Al-Zyoud, Mahran, Carver, Jeffrey C., Alsaleh, Mohammed, Du, Hongying, Gilani, Fida, Jiang, Jun, Rahman, Akond, Kafalı, Özgür, Al-Shaer, Ehab et al..  2017.  Characterizing Scientific Reporting in Security Literature: An Analysis of ACM CCS and IEEE S&P Papers. Proceedings of the Hot Topics in Science of Security: Symposium and Bootcamp. :13–23. doi: 10.1145/3055305.3055307
  URL: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3055305.3055307

ACCOMPLISHMENT HIGHLIGHTS

• We analyzed and refined our paper review rubric to provide sound theoretical basis and to identify good examples from the published literature in cybersecurity.

• We hosted a summer workshop on June 21-22, 2017 for Lablet faculty, postdocs, students, and industry guests.  The workshop included keynote lectures by Dr. Christopher Hazard of Hazardous Software and Dr. Heather Lipford of UNC Charlotte. It also included methodology tutorial sessions taught by Drs. Carver and Stallings as well as sessions for critiquing selected security papers based on our paper review rubric and presentation of Lablet evaluation findings. The workshop concluded with  an industry panel followed by a breakout discussion of participants, each breakout group being led by one of the four industry panelists.