Engineering topics

Frincke, Deborah A

Publications and source records attributed to Frincke, Deborah A.

7 records

DOE OSTI2011

DualTrust: A Distributed Trust Model for Swarm-Based Autonomic Computing Systems

For autonomic computing systems that utilize mobile agents and ant colony algorithms for their sensor layer, trust management is important for the acceptance of the mobile agent sensors and to protect the system from malicious behavior by insiders and entities that have penetrated network defenses. This paper examines the trust relationships, evidence, and decisions in a representative system and finds that by monitoring the trustworthiness of the autonomic managers rather than the swarming sensors, the trust management problem becomes much more scalable and still serves to protect the swarm. We then propose the DualTrust conceptual trust model. By addressing the autonomic manager’s bi-directional primary relationships in the ACS architecture, DualTrust is able to monitor the trustworthiness of the autonomic managers, protect the sensor swarm in a scalable manner, and provide global trust awareness for the orchestrating autonomic manager.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2011

Social/Ethical Issues in Predictive Insider Threat Monitoring

Combining traditionally monitored cybersecurity data with other kinds of organizational data is one option for inferring the motivations of individuals, which may in turn allow early prediction and mitigation of insider threats. While unproven, some researchers believe that this combination of data may yield better results than either cybersecurity or organizational data would in isolation. However, this nontraditional approach creates a potential conflict between goals, such as conflicts between organizational security improvements and individual privacy considerations. There are many facets to debate. Should warning signs of a potential malicious insider be addressed before a malicious event has occurred to prevent harm to the organization and discourage the insider from violating the organization’s rules? Would intervention violate employee trust or legal guidelines? What about the possibilities of misuse? Predictive approaches cannot be validated a priori; false accusations can affect the career of the accused; and collection/monitoring of certain types of data may affect employee morale. In this chapter, we explore some of the social and ethical issues stemming from predictive insider threat monitoring and discuss ways that a predictive modeling approach brings to the forefront social and ethical issues that should be considered and resolved by stakeholders and communities of interest.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2010

A Risk Management Approach to the "Insider Threat"

Abstract Recent surveys indicate that the financial impact and operating losses due to insider intrusions are increasing. But these studies often disagree on what constitutes an insider; indeed, many define it only implicitly. In theory, appropriate selection of, and enforcement of, properly specified security policies should prevent legitimate users from abusing their access to computer systems, information, and other resources. However, even if policies could be expressed precisely, the natural mapping between the natural language expression of a security policy, and the expression of that policy in a form that can be implemented on a computer system or network, creates gaps in enforcement. This paper defines insider precisely, in terms of these gaps, and explores an access-based model for analyzing threats that include those usually termed insider threats. This model enables an organization to order its resources based on the business value for that resource and of the information it contains. By identifying those users with access to high-value resources, we obtain an ordered list of users who can cause the greatest amount of damage. Concurrently with this, we examine psychological indicators in order to determine which users are at the greatest risk of acting inappropriately.We conclude by examining how to merge this model with one of forensic logging and auditing.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

DOE OSTI2010

Combining Traditional Cyber Security Audit Data with Psychosocial Data: Towards Predictive Modeling for Insider Threat Mitigation

The purpose of this chapter is to motivate the combination of traditional cyber security audit data with psychosocial data, so as to move from an insider threat detection stance to one that enables prediction of potential insider presence. Two distinctive aspects of the approach are the objective of predicting or anticipating potential risks and the use of organizational data in addition to cyber data to support the analysis. The chapter describes the challenges of this endeavor and progress in defining a usable set of predictive indicators, developing a framework for integrating the analysis of organizational and cyber security data to yield predictions about possible insider exploits, and developing the knowledge base and reasoning capability of the system. We also outline the types of errors that one expects in a predictive system versus a detection system and discuss how those errors can affect the usefulness of the results.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2010

A multi-phase network situational awareness cognitive task analysis

Abstract The goal of our project is to create a set of next-generation cyber situational-awareness capabilities with applications to other domains in the long term. The objective is to improve the decision-making process to enable decision makers to choose better actions. To this end, we put extensive effort into making certain that we had feedback from network analysts and managers and understand what their genuine needs are. This article discusses the cognitive task-analysis methodology that we followed to acquire feedback from the analysts. This article also provides the details we acquired from the analysts on their processes, goals, concerns, the data and metadata that they analyze. Finally, we describe the generation of a novel task-flow diagram representing the activities of the target user base.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2010

Demythifying Cybersecurity

Consider a face-to-face meeting of exactly five people in a closed and shielded room, hidden from view, with no other communications equipment present. With proper screening, participants can be reasonably sure that the conversation will only be available in real time to those in the room, that the words they hear are the ones spoken by their companions, and that everyone receives them at the same time. Now suppose this same meeting were held as an Internet video conference with the participants scattered over the globe. The attendees may have similar expectations, but meeting those expectations is considerably more difficult. For instance, the administrators of the systems that the participants are using could manipulate the flow of data to rebroadcast, or even change, what individual participants see and hear. In many cases, ISPs and other intermediate providers can do the same; at the least, they can interfere with the transmission. An external attacker who can break into the participants’ systems can do the same. And there may be no proof, or even indications, that the meeting was compromised. As cybersecurity professionals, we understand this - but does the population at large know what happens to their tweets once they leave their smart phones?

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

DOE OSTI2010

An Approach to Trust Management Challenges for Critical Infrastructures

Abstract: The diversity of the kinds of interactions between principals in distributed computing systems, especially critical infrastructures, has expanded rapidly in recent years. However, the state of the art in trust management is not yet sufficient to support this diversity of interactions. This paper presents a rationale and design for much richer trust management than is possible today. It presents a set of requirements for more generalized trustmanagement and an analysis of their necessity. A new trust management framework is presented that supports dynamic and composable trust.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗