Guidelines for Reporting Scientifically Rigorous and Valid Cyber Security Research

ABSTRACT

To advance a scientific field like cyber security, researchers must not only perform scientifically rigorous and valid research but also must report their results in an equally rigorous and valid fashion. To address the reporting side of the equation, we interviewed cyber security experts from the SoS community to gather information about how to construct  guidelines for reporting scientifically rigorous cyber security research that would help researchers maximize their ability to communicate the work's contribution to the overall science. In this interactive session, we will first provide an overview of our research process for developing the current version of the guidelines. We will then introduce the guidelines and ask attendees to apply the guidelines to one of their current or recent papers. We will then facilitate a discussion about the guidelines and their usefulness. The goal of this interactive session is to inform attendees of our progress and to gain practical feedback on the effectiveness of the guidelines in use. To facilitate the interactive portion, we ask attendees to bring one of their own cyber security research papers currently under development (or one that is already published).

BIOS

Dr. Jeffrey Carver is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alabama. His research interests include Empirical Software Engineering, Science of Security, Human Factors in Software Engineering, and Computer Science Education. He is an Associate Editor-in-Chief for Computing in Science & Engineering and on the editorial board for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, Information and Software Technology, and IEEE Software. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM. Contact him at carver@cs.ua.edu

Matthew Armstrong is a third year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Alabama. His research interests include Cyber Security and the cross section of Computer Science and Law.