Pub Crawl #47
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.
Biometric Encryption 2020 
(all)
The use of biometric encryption to control access and authentication is well established. New concerns about privacy create new issues for biometric encryption, however. The increased use of Cloud architectures compounds the problem of providing continuous re-authentication. The research cited here examines these issues. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to resilience, scalability, and metrics.
Recent revelations that processors have had long-standing vulnerabilities have triggered a greater interest in relooking at firmware in general. Research into Basic Input Output Operations Systems (BIOS) has produced some work relevant to the Science of Security issues of human factors, resilience, metrics, and scalability.
Bitcoin is the allegedly secure electronic currency used for both open and nefarious purposes such as ransomware transactions. It does have security issues, however. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to human behavior and scalability.
Black Box Encryption 2020 (all)
Black box encryption is "security of a cryptographic algorithm is studied in the 'black-box' model: e.g., for symmetric encryption, the attacker is given access to a "device" which runs the encryption algorithm with a given key, and can submit plaintexts and ciphertexts, the goal of the attacker being to be able to decrypt a given block without submitting that exact block as ciphertext." This research looks at how to protect the black box itself separate from the encryption problem. For the Science of Security community, back box cryptography is important to composability, metrics, and resilience.
In a blackhole attack, a malicious node advertises itself as the shortest route to a destination, luring packets. The malicious node can then drop the packets or create a false route. For the Science of Security community, this research is relevant to the Hard Problems of resiliency and scalability.
Botnets, a common security threat, are used for a variety of attacks: spam, distributed denial of service (DDOS), ad and spyware, scareware and brute forcing services. Their reach and the challenge of detecting and neutralizing them is compounded in the cloud and on mobile networks. For the Science of Security community, research in this area is related to resiliency, compositionality, and metrics.
Brute Force Attacks 2020 
(all)
Brute force attacks are a method of comprehensively scanning log-in directories to find possibilities for compromising an authentication system. A common form of attack, research into the problem is relevant primarily to the Science of Security hard problems of human factors and policy-based governance.
CAPTCHA (the acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) technology has become a standard security tool. In the research presented here, some novel uses are presented, including use of Captchas as graphical passwords, motion-based captchas, and defeating a captcha using a gaming technique. For the Science of Security community, they are relevant to human behavior and composability.
Adversaries look for ways to combine multiple exploits into one large attack. To be effective, the attacker must think outside the box, know many different technologies, and chain together a number of attacks to achieve his goal. For the Science of Security community, such attacks relate to the hard problems of scalability and resilience.
Channel coding, also known as Forward Error Correction, are methods for controlling errors in data transmissions over noisy or unreliable communications channels. For cybersecurity, these methods can also be used to ensure data integrity, as some of the research cited below shows. The work cited here relates to the Science of Security problems of metrics, resiliency, and composability.
The "clean slate" approach looks at designing networks and internets from scratch, with security built in, in contrast to the evolved Internet in place. The research presented here covers a range of research topics and includes items of interest to the Science of Security, including human behavior, resilience, metrics, and policy governance.
Cognitive Radio Security 2020 (all)
Cognitive radio (CR) is a form of dynamic spectrum management--an intelligent radio that can be programmed and configured dynamically to use the best wireless channels near it. Its capability allows for great network resilience.
Command Injection Attacks 2020 (all)
Command or shell injection is one of the most critical vulnerabilities. To the Science of Security community, command injection attacks impact cyber physical systems and are related to composability, resiliency, and metrics.
Compiler Security Security 2020 (all)
Much of software security focuses on applications, but compiler security should also be an area of concern. Compilers can "correct" secure coding in the name of efficient processing. The works cited here look at various approaches and issues in compiler security. For the Science of Security community, this work relates to resilience, scalability and compositionality, and metrics.
Named Data Networking 2020 (all)
Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of five research projects funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation under its Future Internet Architecture Program. Its goal is to make it easier to develop, manage, secure, and use networks and the Internet. For the Science of Security community, these efforts are relevant to the hard problems of resilience, human behavior, and scalability.
Natural Language Processing 2020 (all)
Natural language processing research focuses on developing efficient algorithms to process texts and to make their information accessible to computer applications. Texts can contain information with different complexities ranging from simple word or token-based representations to rich hierarchical syntactic representations, to high-level logical representations across document collections. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to scalability, resilience, and human behavior.
Nearest Neighbor Search 2020 (all)
The search for secure privacy protecting nearest neighbor searches is an issue in cybersecurity related to the Science of Security community hard problems of measurement and predictive metrics.
Network Accountability 2020 (all)
The term "accountability" suggests that an entity should be held responsible for its own specific actions. Once an event has transpired, the events that took place need to be traceable so that the causes can be determined afterwards. The goal of network accountability research is to provide accountability within networks and computers by building trace files of events. For the Science of Security community, it is relevant to composability, resilience, and metrics.
Network coding methods are used to improve a network's throughput, efficiency and scalability. It can also be a method for dealing with attacks and eavesdropping. For the Science of Security community, research into network coding is relevant to the general network problems associated with the hard problems of resiliency, composability, and predictive metrics, as well as cyber physical systems.
Network Intrusion Detection 2020 (all)
Network intrusion detection is one of the chronic problems in cybersecurity. The growth of cellular and ad hoc networks has increased the threat and risks and research into this area of concern reflects its importance. For the Science of Security community, NID is relevant to metrics, composability, and resilience.
Network Reconnaissance 2020 (all)
The capacity to survey, analyze and assess a network is a critical aspect of developing resilient systems. The work cited here addresses multiple methods and approaches to network reconnaissance. These are related to the Science of Security hard problems of resilience and scalability.
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.
Open devices such as PCs, tablets or smartphones are extremely vulnerable to attacks, since the attacker has complete control over the execution platform and the software implementation itself in the form of a white box attack. The goal of white-box encryption is to create a successful cryptographic algorithm so that assets remain secure even while under white-box attacks. For the Science of Security community, the subject is relevant to composability, resilience, and metrics.
Windows Operating System Security 2020 (all)
Operating system security is a component of resiliency, composability, and an area of concern for predictive metrics. This research focused on the Windows operating system.
Wireless Mesh Network Security 2020 (all)
With more than 70 protocols vying for preeminence over wireless mesh networks, the security problem is magnified. The work cited here relates to the Science of Security hard problems of resiliency, metrics, and composability.
Work Factor Metrics 2020 (all)
It is difficult to measure the relative strengths and weaknesses of modern information systems when the safety, security, and reliability of those systems must be protected. Developers often apply security to systems without the ability to evaluate the impact of those mechanisms to the overall system. Few efforts are directed at actually measuring the quantifiable impact of information assurance technology on the potential adversary. For the Science of Security community, this work is relevant to resilience and scalability.
Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has become an area of interest in research community. Many state-of-the-art models for machine learning lack transparency and interpretability, a major drawback in many applications where the rationale for the model's decision is a requirement for trust. For the Science of Security community, XAI is relevant to resilience and scalability.
Zero Day Attacks and Defense 2020 (all)
Zero day attacks exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities in software that programmers have not yet patched or fixed. For the Science of Security community, zero day exploits related to predictive metrics, resiliency, and composability.
If there is no link between a pair of entities, no trust decision has yet been made. Operating in an unknown trust environment creates security problems related to scalability, policy-based governance, human factors, and resilience.
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.