Understanding and Accounting for Human Behavior

Although human users can greatly affect the security of systems intended to be resilient, we lack a detailed understanding of their motivations, decisions, and actions. The broad aim of this project is to provide a scientific basis and techniques for cybersecurity risk assessment. This is achieved through development of a general-purpose modeling and simulation approach for cybersecurity aspects of cyber-systems and of all human agents that interact with those systems. These agents include adversaries, defenders, and users.

We believe that diversity and redundancy can help us prevent an attacker from hiding all of his or her traces. Therefore, we will strategically deploy diverse security monitors and build a set of techniques to combine information originating at the monitors. We have shown that we can formulate monitor deployment as a constrained optimization problem wherein the objective function is the utility of monitors in detecting intrusions.

Effective response to security attacks often requires a combination of both automated and human-mediated actions. Currently we lack adequate methods to reason about such human-system coordination, including ways to determine when to allocate tasks to each party and how to gain assurance that automated mechanisms are appropriately aligned with organizational needs and policies.