Biblio

Internet is facing many challenges that cannot be solved easily through ad hoc patches. To address these challenges, many research programs and projects have been initiated and many solutions are being proposed. However, before we have a new architecture that can motivate Internet service providers (ISPs) to deploy and evolve, we need to address two issues: 1) know the current status better by appropriately evaluating the existing Internet; and 2) find how various incentives and strategies will affect the deployment of the new architecture. For the first issue, we define a series of quantitative metrics that can potentially unify results from several measurement projects using different approaches and can be an intrinsic part of future Internet architecture (FIA) for monitoring and evaluation. Using these metrics, we systematically evaluate the current interdomain routing system and reveal many “autonomous-system-level” observations and key lessons for new Internet architectures. Particularly, the evaluation results reveal the imbalance underlying the interdomain routing system and how the deployment of FIAs can benefit from these findings. With these findings, for the second issue, appropriate deployment strategies of the future architecture changes can be formed with balanced incentives for both customers and ISPs. The results can be used to shape the short- and long-term goals for new architectures that are simple evolutions of the current Internet (so-called dirty-slate architectures) and to some extent to clean-slate architectures.

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.