Biblio

This Innovative Practice Work-in-Progress paper presents a virtual, proactive, and collaborative learning paradigm that can engage learners with different backgrounds and enable effective retention and transfer of the multidisciplinary AI-cybersecurity knowledge. While progress has been made to better understand the trustworthiness and security of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, little has been done to translate this knowledge to education and training. There is a critical need to foster a qualified cybersecurity workforce that understands the usefulness, limitations, and best practices of AI technologies in the cybersecurity domain. To address this import issue, in our proposed learning paradigm, we leverage multidisciplinary expertise in cybersecurity, AI, and statistics to systematically investigate two cohesive research and education goals. First, we develop an immersive learning environment that motivates the students to explore AI/machine learning (ML) development in the context of real-world cybersecurity scenarios by constructing learning models with tangible objects. Second, we design a proactive education paradigm with the use of hackathon activities based on game-based learning, lifelong learning, and social constructivism. The proposed paradigm will benefit a wide range of learners, especially underrepresented students. It will also help the general public understand the security implications of AI. In this paper, we describe our proposed learning paradigm and present our current progress of this ongoing research work. In the current stage, we focus on the first research and education goal and have been leveraging cost-effective Minecraft platform to develop an immersive learning environment where the learners are able to investigate the insights of the emerging AI/ML concepts by constructing related learning modules via interacting with tangible AI/ML building blocks.

One way to detect and assess software vulnerabilities is by extracting security-related information from commit messages. Automating the detection and assessment of vulnerabilities upon security commit messages is still challenging due to the lack of structured and clear messages. We created a convention, called SECOM, for security commit messages that structure and include bits of security-related information that are essential for detecting and assessing vulnerabilities for both humans and tools. The full convention and details are available here: https://tqrg.github.io/secom/.

A modular static analysis decomposes a program's analysis into analyses of its parts, or components. An intercomponent analysis instructs an intra-component analysis to analyse each component independently of the others. Additional analyses are scheduled for newly discovered components, and for dependent components that need to account for newly discovered component information. Modular static analyses are scalable, can be tuned to a high precision, and support the analysis of programs that are highly dynamic, featuring e.g., higher-order functions or dynamically allocated processes.In this paper, we present the engineering aspects of MAF, a static analysis framework for implementing modular analyses for higher-order languages. For any such modular analysis, the framework provides a reusable inter-component analysis and it suffices to implement its intra-component analysis. The intracomponent analysis can be composed from several interdependent and reusable Scala traits. This design facilitates changing the analysed language, as well as the analysis precision with minimal effort. We illustrate the use of MAF through its instantiation for several different analyses of Scheme programs.

Over the years, human errors have been identified as one of the most critical factors impacting cybersecurity in an organization that has had a substantial impact. The research uses recent articles published on human resources and information cybersecurity. This research focuses on the vulnerabilities and the best solution to mitigate these threats based on literature review methodology. The study also focuses on identifying the human attitude and behavior towards cybersecurity and how that would impact the organization's financial impact. With the help of the Two-factor Taxonomy of the security behavior model developed in past research, the research aims to identify the best practices and compare the best practices with that of the attitude-behavior found and matched to the model. Finally, the study would compare the difference between best practices and the current practices from the model. This would help provide the organization with specific recommendations that would help change their attitude and behavior towards cybersecurity and ensure the organization is not fearful of the cyber threat of human error threat.

The rapid progress experienced in the Internet of Things (IoT) space is one that has introduced new and unique challenges for cybersecurity and IoT-Forensics. One of these problems is how digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) are handled in IoT. Since enormous users use IoT platforms to accomplish their day to day task, massive amounts of data streams are transferred with limited hardware resources; conducting DFIR needs a new approach to mitigate digital evidence and incident response challenges owing to the facts that there are no unified standard or classified principles for IoT forensics. Today's IoT DFIR relies on self-defined best practices and experiences. Given these challenges, IoT-related incidents need a more structured approach in identifying problems of DFIR. In this paper, we examined the major DFIR challenges in IoT by exploring the different phases involved in a DFIR when responding to IoT-related incidents. This study aims to provide researchers and practitioners a road-map that will help improve the standards of IoT security and DFIR.

An effective way for building secure software is to embed security into software in the early stages of software development. Thus, we aim to study several evidences of code anomalies introduced during the software development phase, that may be indicators of security issues in software, such as code smells, structural complexity represented by diverse software metrics, the issues detected by static code analysers, and finally missing security best practices. To use such evidences for vulnerability prediction and removal, we first need to understand how they are correlated with security issues. Then, we need to discover how these imperfect raw data can be integrated to achieve a reliable, accurate and valuable decision about a portion of code. Finally, we need to construct a security actuator providing suggestions to the developers to remove or fix the detected issues from the code. All of these will lead to the construction of a framework, including security monitoring, security analyzer, and security actuator platforms, that are necessary for a security-aware integrated development environment (SIDE).

Technical debt is an analogy introduced in 1992 by Cunningham to help explain how intentional decisions not to follow a gold standard or best practice in order to save time or effort during creation of software can later on lead to a product of lower quality in terms of product quality itself, reliability, maintainability or extensibility. Little work has been done so far that applies this analogy to cyber physical (production) systems (CP(P)S). Also there is only little work that uses this analogy for security related issues. This work aims to fill this gap: We want to find out which security related symptoms within the field of cyber physical production systems can be traced back to TD items during all phases, from requirements and design down to maintenance and operation. This work shall support experts from the field by being a first step in exploring the relationship between not following security best practices and concrete increase of costs due to TD as consequence.

Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is a recent concept where virtualization enables the shift from network functions (e.g., routers, switches, load-balancers, proxies) on specialized hardware appliances to software images running on all-purpose, high-volume servers. The resource allocation problem in the NFV environment has received considerable attention in the past years. However, little attention was paid to the security aspects of the problem in spite of the increasing number of vulnerabilities faced by cloud-based applications. Securing the services is an urgent need to completely benefit from the advantages offered by NFV. In this paper, we show how a network service request, composed of a set of service function chains (SFC) should be modified and enriched to take into consideration the security requirements of the supported service. We examine the well-known security best practices and propose a two-step algorithm that extends the initial SFC requests to a more complex chaining model that includes the security requirements of the service.

Traditional security practices focus on negative incentives that attempt to force compliance through constraints, monitoring, and punishment. This paper describes a missing dimension of most organizations' insider threat defense-one that explicitly considers positive incentives for attracting individuals to act in the interests of the organization. Positive incentives focus on properties of the organizational context of workforce management practices - including those relating to organizational supportiveness, coworker connectedness, and job engagement. Without due attention to the organizational context in which insider threats occur, insider misbehaviors may simply reoccur as a natural response to counterproductive or dysfunctional management practices. A balanced combination of positive and negative incentives can improve employees' relationships with the organization and provide a means for employees to better cope with personal and professional stressors. An insider threat program that balances organizational incentives can become an advocate for the workforce and a means for improving employee work life - a welcome message to employees who feel threatened by programs focused on discovering insider wrongdoing.

In 2013 West Virginia University consolidated a few individually purchased college and individual licenses for Qualtrics survey software into a single campus-wide license that includes all of our colleges and regional campuses, to be implemented as a campus standard and enterprise solution for our campus. Due to some staff reorganizations over the past two years, I and the other Qualtrics brand administrators at WVU are all new to this administrative role. In this paper, I plan to share lessons that I learned while (1) participating in developing and documenting new business processes, (2) transitioning to serve as the main brand administrator, (3) cleaning up user accounts that had not been actively managed for years, and (4) working with the Qualtrics vendor, local group administrators, my IT colleagues, and campus users as we refine a set of best practices for product usage and administration. Although this paper discusses a campus-wide implementation of Qualtrics survey software, I feel that the lessons I learned during this process could be extrapolated to the development of best practices for other products or IT services.

Up-to-date studies and surveys regarding IT security show, that companies of every size and branch nowadays are faced with the growing risk of cyber crime. Many tools, standards and best practices are in place to support enterprise IT security experts in dealing with the upcoming risks, whereas meanwhile especially small and medium sized enterprises(SMEs) feel helpless struggling with the growing threats. This article describes an approach, how SMEs can attain high quality assurance whether they are a victim of cyber crime, what kind of damage resulted from a certain attack and in what way remediation can be done. The focus on all steps of the analysis lies in the economic feasibility and the typical environment of SMEs.