Pub Crawl #40
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.
Acoustic Fingerprints 2019 
(all)
Acoustic fingerprints can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database. As a security tool, fingerprints offer a modality of biometric identification of a user. Current research is exploring various aspects and applications, including the use of these fingerprints for mobile device security, antiforensics, use of image processing techniques, and client side embedding.
As the power of digital signal processors has increased, adaptive filters are now routinely used in many devices as varied as mobile phones, printers, cameras, power systems, GPS devices and medical monitoring equipment. An adaptive filter uses an optimization algorithm in a system with a linear filter to adjust parameters that have a transfer function controlled by variable parameter. Because of the complexity of the optimization algorithms, most of these adaptive filters are digital filters. They are required for some applications because some parameters of the desired processing operation are not known in advance or are changing. The works cited here are articles about adaptive filtering as it relates to the Science of Security hard problems of scalability, resilience, and metrics.
Ad Hoc Network Security 2019 
(all)
Security is an important research issue for ad hoc networks (MANETs). For the Science of Security community, this work relates to the hard problems of resilience, metrics, and compositionality.
Advanced Persistent Threat 2019 (all)
Advanced persistent threats are the subject of considerable research of interest to the Science of Security community. Research areas address the hard problems of human behavior, scalability, resilience, and metrics.
The need to understand adversarial behavior in light of new technologies is always important. Using models to understand their behavior is an important element in the Science of Security for addressing human behavior, scalability, resilience, and metrics.
John McCarthy, coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" in 1955 and defined it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." (as quoted in Poole, Mackworth & Goebel, 1998) AI research is highly technical and specialized, and has been characterized as "deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other." (McCorduck, Pamela (2004), Machines Who Think (2nd ed.) These divisions are attributed to both technical and social factors. The research cited here looks at the privacy implications of artificial intelligence. For the Science of Security community, AI is relevant to human factors, scalability, and resilience.
Air gaps--the physical separation of one computing system from another--is a classical defense mechanism based upon the assumption that data is safe if it cannot be touched electronically. However, air gaps may not be designed with adequate consideration for electronic emanations, thermal radiation, or other physical factors that might be exploited. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to the hard problems of composability, resilience, human behavior, and metrics.
The proliferation and increased capability of "smart phones" has also increased security issues for users. For the Science of Security community, these small computing platforms have the same hard problems to solve as main frames, data centers, or desktops. The research cited here looked at encryption issues specific to the Android operating system. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to scalability, human behavior, metrics, and resilience.
Minimizing privacy risk is one of the major problems in the development of social media and hand-held smart phone technologies, vehicle ad hoc networks, and wireless sensor networks. For the Science of Security community, the research issues addressed relate to the hard problems of resiliency, composability, metrics, and human behavior.
Anonymous Messaging 2019 (all)
Anonymous messages contain embedded information about where to send them next. In theory, message strings can become untraceable and anonymity maintained. This is a double-edged issue, offering security and privacy on the one hand and creating an attribution problem on the other. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the problems of resiliency and scalability.
Applications Programming Interfaces, APIs, are definitions of interfaces to systems or modules. As code is reused, more and more are modified from earlier code. For the Science of Security community, the problems of compositionality and resilience are direct.
Artificial Intelligence Security 2019 (all)
John McCarthy, coined the term "Artificial Intelligence" in 1955 and defined it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." (as quoted in Poole, Mackworth & Goebel, 1998) AI research is highly technical and specialized, and has been characterized as "deeply divided into subfields that often fail to communicate with each other." (McCorduck, Pamela (2004), Machines Who Think (2nd ed.) These divisions are attributed to both technical and social factors. For the Science of Security community, AI research has implications for resilience, composability, metrics, and human behavior.
Artificial Neural Networks 2019 
(all)
Artificial neural networks have been used to solve a wide variety of tasks that are hard to solve using ordinary rule-based programming. What has attracted much interest in neural networks is the possibility of learning. Tasks such as function approximation, classification pattern and sequence recognition, anomaly detection, filtering, clustering, blind source separation and compression and controls all have security implications. Cyber physical systems, resiliency, policy-based governance and metrics are the Science of Security interests.
Asymmetric Encryption 2019 (all)
Asymmetric, or public key, encryption is a cornerstone of cybersecurity. The research presented here looks at key distribution, compares symmetric and asymmetric security, and evaluates cryptographic algorithms, among other approaches. For the Science of Security community, encryption is a primary element for resiliency, compositionality, metrics, and behavior.
Security analysts use attack graphs for detection, defense and forensics. An attack graph is defined as a representation of all paths through a system that end in a state where an intruder has successfully breached the system. They are an important tool for the Science of Security related to predictive metrics, resiliency, and composability.
Attestation is the verification of changes to software as part of trusted computing. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to composability, resilience, and human behavior.
Attribute-based Encryption 2019 (all)
In an attribution-based encryption system, the decryption of a ciphertext should be possible only if the set of attributes of the user key matches the attributes of the ciphertext. The two types of attribute-based encryption schemes are key-policy attribute-based encryption and ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to the hard problems of scalability, human behavior, and policy-based governance.
Intrusion Tolerance 2018 (all)
Intrusion tolerance refers to a fault-tolerant design approach to defending communications, computer and other information systems against malicious attack. Rather than detecting all anomalies, tolerant systems only identify those intrusions which lead to security failures. The topic relates to the Science of Security issues of resilience and composability.
Intrusion Tolerance 2019 (all)
Intrusion tolerance refers to a fault-tolerant design approach to defending communications, computer and other information systems against malicious attack. Rather than detecting all anomalies, tolerant systems only identify those intrusions which lead to security failures. The topic relates to the Science of Security issues of resilience and composability.
The proliferation and increased capability of "smart phones" has also increased security issues for users. For the Science of Security community, these small computing platforms have the same hard problems to solve as main frames, data centers, or desktops. The research cited here looked at encryption issues specific to Apple's iOS operating system. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the hard problems of compositionality, human factors, resiliency, and metrics.
The proliferation and increased capability of "smart phones" has also increased security issues for users. For the Science of Security community, these small computing platforms have the same hard problems to solve as main frames, data centers, or desktops. The research cited here looked at encryption issues specific to Apple's iOS operating system. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the hard problems of compositionality, human factors, resiliency, and metrics.
The term Internet of Things (IT) refers to advanced connectivity of the Internet with devices, systems and services that include both machine-to-machine communications (M2M) and a variety of protocols, domains and applications. Since the concept incorporates literally billions of devices, the security implications are huge. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to the hard problems of resilience, composability, human behavior, and metrics.
Intellectual Property protection continues to be a matter of major research interest. The topic is related to the Science of Security regarding resilience, policy-based governance, and composability.
Intellectual Property protection continues to be a matter of major research interest. The topic is related to the Science of Security regarding resilience, policy-based governance, and composability.
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.
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.