Biblio
As information systems become increasingly interdependent, there is an increased need to share cybersecurity data across government agencies and companies, and within and across industrial sectors. This sharing includes threat, vulnerability and incident reporting data, among other data. For cyberattacks that include sociotechnical vectors, such as phishing or watering hole attacks, this increased sharing could expose customer and employee personal data to increased privacy risk. In the US, privacy risk arises when the government voluntarily receives data from companies without meaningful consent from individuals, or without a lawful procedure that protects an individual's right to due process. In this paper, we describe a study to examine the trade-off between the need for potentially sensitive data, which we call incident data usage, and the perceived privacy risk of sharing that data with the government. The study is comprised of two parts: a data usage estimate built from a survey of 76 security professionals with mean eight years' experience; and a privacy risk estimate that measures privacy risk using an ordinal likelihood scale and nominal data types in factorial vignettes. The privacy risk estimate also factors in data purposes with different levels of societal benefit, including terrorism, imminent threat of death, economic harm, and loss of intellectual property. The results show which data types are high-usage, low-risk versus those that are low-usage, high-risk. We discuss the implications of these results and recommend future work to improve privacy when data must be shared despite the increased risk to privacy.
Objective: The overarching goal is to convey the concept of science of security and the contributions that a scientifically based, human factors approach can make to this interdisciplinary field.Background: Rather than a piecemeal approach to solving cybersecurity problems as they arise, the U.S. government is mounting a systematic effort to develop an approach grounded in science. Because humans play a central role in security measures, research on security-related decisions and actions grounded in principles of human information-processing and decision-making is crucial to this interdisciplinary effort.Method: We describe the science of security and the role that human factors can play in it, and use two examples of research in cybersecurity—detection of phishing attacks and selection of mobile applications—to illustrate the contribution of a scientific, human factors approach.Results: In these research areas, we show that systematic information-processing analyses of the decisions that users make and the actions they take provide a basis for integrating the human component of security science.Conclusion: Human factors specialists should utilize their foundation in the science of applied information processing and decision making to contribute to the science of cybersecurity.