CfP: HICSS Defensive Cyber Deception Minitrack in Digital Government

Deadline: June 15, 2019

HICSS-53 Defensive Cyber Deception - Call For Papers

January 7-10, 2020 in Maui, Hawaii

Description
Creating a system that is always protected and secure in all situations against all attackers is a far-reaching and likely impossible goal. It is important for researchers to continue to move systems closer towards absolute security, but it is also essential to create techniques so a system can adaptively defend against an attacker who circumvents the current security. Deception for cyber defense starts to get towards that goal--to rebalance the asymmetric nature of computer defense by increasing attacker workload while decreasing that of the defender.

Cyber deception is one defensive technique that considers the human component of a cyber attack. Deception holds promise as a successful tactic for making an attacker's job harder because it does more than just block access: it can also cause the attacker to waste both time and effort. Moreover, deception can be used by a defender to impart an incorrect belief in the attacker, the effects of which can go beyond any static defense. Understanding the human cognition and behavior of both the cyber defender and cyber attacker is a critical component of cybersecurity.

In the cyber world, an attacker only knows what is perceived through observation of the target network. The intruder is often thousands of miles away from the network to which he or she is attempting to gain entry. Networks often unintentionally provide more information to an attacker than defenders would like. However, the network owner also has the opportunity to reveal information he or she desires the attacker to know--including deceptive information. Because network information is often complex and incomplete, it provides a natural environment in which to imbed deception since, in chaos, there is opportunity. Deception can alter the mindset, confidence, and decision-making process of an attacker, which can have more significant effects than traditional defenses. Furthermore, using deception for defensive purposes gives the defender at least partial control of what an attacker knows, which can provide opportunities for strategic interaction with an attacker.

These research efforts require an interdisciplinary approach and track is soliciting papers across multiple disciplines. It is essential to understand attacker and defender cognition and behavior to effectively and strategically induce cognitive biases and increase cognitive load, making our systems difficult to attack.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Science of Deception (e.g., evaluation techniques, deception frameworks applied to cyber);
• Practice of Cyber Deception (e.g., case studies, deception technology, deception detection);
• Understanding/influencing the cyber adversary (e.g., adversary emulation, measures of effectiveness);
• Psychological and social-cultural adversarial mental models that can be used to estimate and predict adversarial mental states and decision processes;
• Cognitive Modeling of cyber tasks;
• Adversary observation/learning schemes through both active multilevel
• "honey bait" systems and passive watching, in conjunction with active learning and reasoning to deal with partial information and uncertainties;
• Oppositional Human Factors to induce cognitive biases and increase cognitive load for cyber attackers;
• Metrics for quantifying deception effectiveness in driving adversary mental state and in determining optimized deception information composition and projection;
• Experimental Design, approaches, and results;
• Theoretical formulation for a one-shot or multiple rounds of attacker/defender interaction models;
• Identification of social/cultural factors in mental state estimation and decision manipulation process;
• Cyber maneuver and adaptive defenses;
• Protecting our autonomous systems from being deceived;
• Policy hurdles, solutions, and case studies in adoption of cyber deception technologies.

Chair:
Kimberly Ferguson-Walter
Department of Defense
Kimberly.ferguson-wa@navy.mil

Co-Chairs:
Sunny Fugate
Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific
fugate@spawar.navy.mil

Cliff Wang
Army Research Office
xiaogang.x.wang.civ@mail.mil