United States of America

The attached comment discusses Semantic eScience in the context of the Philosophy of Science and Joint Doctrine. In summary,

• The Philosophy of Science suggests that there are significant limitations to the predictive power of Semantic eScience;
• Semantic eScience could be more strongly aligned with Joint Doctrine.

The effectiveness of Semantic eScience relative to other methods is not discussed because the effectiveness of Semantic eScience as a cybersecurity tool can only be established by field studies.

Abstract: Developing cyber-physical systems involves multiple engineering domains, e.g., timing, logical correctness, thermal resilience, and mechanical stress. In today's industrial practice, these domains rely on multiple analyses to obtain and verify critical system properties. Domain differences make the analyses abstract away interactions among themselves, potentially invalidating the results. Specifically, one challenge is to ensure that an analysis is never applied to a model that violates the assumptions of the analysis.

Abstract: Modern cyber-physical systems interact closely with continuous physical processes like kinematic movement. Software component frameworks do not provide an explicit way to represent or reason about these processes. Meanwhile, hybrid program models have been successful in proving critical properties of discrete-continuous systems. These programs deal with diverse aspects of a cyber-physical system such as controller decisions, component communication protocols, and mechanical dynamics, requiring several programs to address the variation.

Technical defenses (such as email filtering, malware detection, firewalls, limited user privileges, and system monitoring) leave systems unnecessarily exposed to phishing attacks because the human attack surface remains easily accessible and subject to successful attacks based on principles of psychology which are exploited using military deception. The authors propose deception countermeasures which modify the email interface, thereby making the user less susceptible to email-based deception.