Pub Crawl #35
Pub Crawl summarizes, by hard problems, sets of publications that have been peer reviewed and presented at SoS conferences or referenced in current work. The topics are chosen for their usefulness for current researchers. Select the topic name to view the corresponding list of publications. Submissions and suggestions are welcome.
Random Key Generation 2019 
(all)
Random and pseudorandom numbers can be used for the generation, exchange, storage, use, and replacement of keys, key servers, cryptographic protocols, and user procedures. For researchers, random key generation is a challenge to create larger scale and faster systems to operate within the cloud and other complex environments, while ensuring validity and not adding weight to the process. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to scalability, resilience, metrics, and human behavior.
"Ransomware" is the name given to malicious software that locks a computer until an extorted fee or ransom is paid for the key to unlock it. This ransom is usually paid in bitcoin. For the Science of Security community, there are implications for resiliency, composability, and metrics.
Recommender Systems 2019 (all)
Recommender systems are rating systems filters used to predict a user's preferences for a particular item. Frequently they are used to identify related objects of interest based on a user's preference to market similar items. As such they create a problem for cybersecurity and privacy related to the hard problems of human factors, scalability, and resilience.
Magnetic remanence is the property that allows an attacker to recreate files that have been overwritten. For the Science of Security community, it is a topic relevant to the hard problems of resilience and compositionality and has major implications for the Internet of Things and other cyber physical systems.
Repudiation and non-repudiation are core topics in cybersecurity. For the Science of Security community, they relate to resilience, human behavior, metrics, and composability.
Resiliency of cybersecurity systems and their development is one of the five major hard problems in the Science of Security.
Return Oriented Programming 2019 (all)
Memory corruption attacks account for many security breaches afflicting software systems. Return-oriented programming (ROP) techniques are often used to bypass the most common memory protection systems. For the Science of Security community, this research is related to resilience, scalability, composability and human factors.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) has become a ubiquitous identification system used to provide positive identification for items as diverse as cheese and pets. Research into RFID technologies continues and the security of RFID tags is being increasingly questioned. This work is related to the Science of Security issues of resiliency and human behaviors.
Memory corruption attacks account for many security breaches afflicting software systems. Return-oriented programming (ROP) techniques are often used to bypass the most common memory protection systems. For the Science of Security community, this research is related to resilience, scalability, composability and human factors.
Router Systems Security 2019 (all)
Routers are among the most ubiquitous electronic devices in use. Basic security from protocols and encryption can be readily achieved, but routing has many leaks. For the Science of Security community, they are related to the hard problems of resiliency and predictive metrics.
Coding standards encourage programmers to follow a set of uniform rules and guidelines determined by the requirements of the project and organization, rather than by the programmer's personal familiarity or preference. Developers and software designers apply these coding standards during software development to create secure systems. The development of secure coding standards is a work in progress by security researchers, language experts, and software developers. The articles cited here cover topics related to the Science of Security hard problems of resilience, metrics, human factors, and policy-based governance.
Sandboxing is an important tool for the Science of Security, particularly with regard to developing composable systems and policy-governed systems. To many researchers, it is a promising method for preventing and containing damage. Sandboxing, frequently used to test unverified programs that may contain malware, allows the software to run without harming the host device.
SCADA Systems Security 2019 (all)
SCADA system security issues have been identified as a problem for more than a decade. The work cited here addresses the issue relevant to the Science of Security hard problems of resiliency, compositionality, and human behavior.
Scalability is one of the hard problems in the Science of Security. Applied to larger data sets, increases in interoperability, and greater computing capacity, particularly in critical infrastructures and the Internet of Things, the development of effective automated scalable systems is compounded.
Scalable Verification 2019 (all)
Verification of software and its security features can be done statically or dynamically. A challenge is to conduct verifications at scale to determine whether all the features do what they are intended to do. For the Science of Security community, scalable verification relates to scalability and compositionality, resilience, and predictive metrics.
Science of Security 2019 
(all)
Many more articles and research studies are appearing with "Science of Security" as a keyword. The articles cited here discuss the degree to which security is a science and various issues surrounding its development, ranging from basic approach to essential elements. The articles cited here address the fundamental concepts of the Science of Security.
Scientific Computing Security 2019 (all)
Scientific computing is concerned with constructing mathematical models and quantitative analysis techniques and using computers to analyze and solve scientific problems. As a practical matter, scientific computing is the use of computer simulation and other forms of computation from numerical analysis and theoretical computer science to solve specific problems such as cybersecurity. For the Science of Security community, it relates to predictive metrics, compositionality, and resilience.
Software Defined Network (SDN) architectures have been developed to provide improved routing and networking performance for broadband networks by separating the control plain from the data plain. This separation also provides opportunities and challenges for SDN as a security element in IoT and cyberphysical systems. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to resilience and scalability.
Searchable Encryption 2019 (all)
Searchable encryption allows one to store encrypted data externally, but still allow for easy data searches that do not require the search to download everything before decrypting and to allow others to search data without having access to plaintext. As an application, it is becoming increasingly important in the Cloud environment. For the Science of Security community, it is an area of research related to cryptography, resilience, and composability.
Secure File Sharing 2019 (all)
Data leakage while file sharing continues to be a major problem for cybersecurity, especially with the advent of cloud storage. Secure file sharing is relevant to the Science of Security community hard topics of resilience, composability, metrics, and human behavior.
The ability to conduct automated security audits rapidly and accurately helps to reduce the time between attack and its detection, hopefully reducing the consequences of the attack. Research into security audit methods and techniques supports addressing the hard problem of human behavior, as well as resiliency and scalability.
Security Heuristics 2019 (all)
Heuristic analysis is a method employed by many computer antivirus programs designed to detect "Zero Day" or previously unknown computer viruses and new variants of viruses already "in the wild." It is an expert-based analytic method that uses various decision rules or weighing methods. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to the hard problems of resilience, scalability, and predictability.
Measurement and metrics are one of the five hard problems in the Science of Security.
Security Risk Estimation 2019 (all)
Calculating risk in cyberphysical systems is a complex process. The work cited here approaches the problem relative to the Science of Security hard problems of human factors, scalability, resilience, and metrics.
Signature Based Defense 2019 (all)
Research into the use of malware signatures to inform defensive methods is a standard research exercise for the Science of Security community. This work addresses issues related to scalability and resilience.
Concerns about consumer privacy and electric power usage have impacted utilities fielding of smart-meters. Securing power meter readings in a way that addresses while protecting consumer privacy is a concern of research designed to help alleviate those concerns. For the Science of Security community, privacy is a core topic.
Supply Chain Security 2019 (all)
Threats to the supply chain in terms of delivery, integrity, content and the provenance of components and parts appear to be growing. For the Science of Security community, supply chain security is relevant to resilient architectures, scalability, and human behavior issues.
A Sybil attack occurs when a node in a network claims multiple identities. The attacker may subvert the entire reputation system of the network by creating a large number of false identities and using them to gain influence. For the Science of Security community, these attacks are relevant to resilience, metrics, and composability.
System recovery following an attack is a core cybersecurity issue. Current research into methods to undo data manipulation and to recover lost or extruded data in distributed, cloud-based or other large scale complex systems is discovering new approaches and methods. For the Science of Security community, it is an essential element of resiliency.
Tamper resistance is an important element for composability of software systems and for security of cyber physical system resilience. For the Science of Security community, it is also relevant to scalability, metrics, and human factors.
Theoretical Cryptography 2019 (all)
Cryptography can only exist if there is a mathematical hardness to it constructed to maintain a desired functionality, even under malicious attempts to change or destroy the prescribed functionality. The foundations of theoretical cryptography are the paradigms, approaches and techniques used to conceptualize, define and provide solutions to natural "security concerns" mathematically using probability-based definitions, various constructions, complexity theoretic primitives and proofs of security. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the broad problem of developing a science, as well as contributing to the solution of the hard problems of composability and compositionality.
Threat mitigation is a continuous need in cybersecurity. For the Science of Security community, threat mitigation is related to resiliency, metrics, and human behavior.
As systems become larger and more complex, the surface that hackers can attack also grows. Is this set of recent research articles, topics are explored that include smartphone malware, zero-day polymorphic worm detection, source identification, drive-by download attacks, two-factor face authentication, semantic security, and code structures. Of particular interest to the Science of Security community are the research articles focused on measurement and on privacy.
Trojan Horse Detection 2019 (all)
Detection and neutralization of hardware-embedded Trojans is a difficult problem. Current research is attempting to find ways to develop detection methods and processes and to automate the process. This research is relevant to cyber-physical systems security, resilience and composability, as well as being an issue in supply chain security.
Trust routing schemes are a key component for building resilient architectures and for composable and scalable security systems.
Two Factor Authentication 2019 (all)
Two factor authentication or 2FA is regarded as a solution to common attacks. However, it sometimes becomes a form of bait for attackers, because it it is often used to secure high value information. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to the hard problem of human factors.
Ubiquitous Computing Security 2019 (all)
Ubiquitous computing is a concept in software engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any device, in any location, and in any format. Incorporating all aspects of the cyber world, including the internet, the processor, the Cloud, and so on, ubiquitous computing has significant security challenges. The Science of Security community, the work cited here is relevant to scalability, metrics, human factors and resilience.
Underwater Networks 2019 (all)
Underwater networks have some unique security issues related to the environment they operate in. For the Science of security community, the research conducted and presented here is relevant to cyber-physical systems and work on resiliency, metrics, and scalability.
Virtual Machine Security 2019 (all)
Arguably, virtual machines are more secure than actual machines. This idea is based on the notion that an attacker cannot jump the gap between the virtual and the actual. The growth of interest in cloud computing suggest it is time for a fresh look at the vulnerabilities in virtual machines. In the articles presented below, security concerns are addressed in some interesting ways. For the Science of Security community, virtualization is related to composability, resiliency, cyber physical systems, and cryptography.
Articles listed on these pages have been found on publicly available internet pages and are cited with links to those pages. Some of the information included herein has been reprinted with permission from the authors or data repositories. Direct any requests for removal via email of the links or modifications to specific citations. Please include the URL of the specific citation in your correspondence.
Pub Crawl contains bibliographical citations, abstracts if available, links on specific topics, and research problems of interest to the Science of Security community.
How recent are these publications?
These bibliographies include recent scholarly research on topics that have been presented or published within the stated year. Some represent updates from work presented in previous years; others are new topics.
How are topics selected?
The specific topics are selected from materials that have been peer reviewed and presented at SoS conferences or referenced in current work. The topics are also chosen for their usefulness for current researchers.
How can I submit or suggest a publication?
Researchers willing to share their work are welcome to submit a citation, abstract, and URL for consideration and posting, and to identify additional topics of interest to the community. Researchers are also encouraged to share this request with their colleagues and collaborators.
What are the hard problems?
Select a hard problem to retrieve related publications.
- Scalability and Composability: Develop methods to enable the construction of secure systems with known security properties from components with known security properties, without a requirement to fully re-analyze the constituent components.
- Policy-Governed Secure Collaboration: Develop methods to express and enforce normative requirements and policies for handling data with differing usage needs and among users in different authority domains.
- Security Metrics Driven Evaluation, Design, Development, and Deployment: Develop security metrics and models capable of predicting whether or confirming that a given cyber system preserves a given set of security properties (deterministically or probabilistically), in a given context.
- Resilient Architectures: Develop means to design and analyze system architectures that deliver required service in the face of compromised components.
- Understanding and Accounting for Human Behavior: Develop models of human behavior (of both users and adversaries) that enable the design, modeling, and analysis of systems with specified security properties.