Within the field of information security, the identification of what we are trying to secure is essential to reducing risk. In private networks, this means understanding the classification of host end-points, identifying responsible users, and knowing the location of hosts. For the context of this paper, the authors are considering the challenges faced by higher education institutions in implementing the first Center for Internet Security (CIS) Critical Security Control: inventory of authorized and unauthorized devices. The authors developed and conducted a survey of chief information security officers at these institutions. The survey evaluated their confidence in meeting the goals of host inventory tracking. The results of the survey, along with analysis of the implications for information security operations, are presented in this paper. Changes in technology, such as BYOD, IoT, wireless, virtual machines, and application containers, are contributing to changes in the effectiveness of host inventory controls.
An incessant rhythm of data breaches, data leaks, and privacy exposure highlights the need to improve control over potentially sensitive data. History has shown that neither public nor private sector organizations are immune. Lax data handling, incidental leakage, and adversarial breaches are all contributing factors. Prudent organizations should consider the sensitive nature of network security data. Logged events often contain data elements that are directly correlated with sensitive information about people and their activities-often at the same level of detail as sensor data. Our intent is to produce a database which holds network security data representative of people's interaction with the network mid-points and end-points without the problems of identifiability. In this paper we discuss architectures and propose a system design that supports a risk based approach to privacy preserving data publication of network security data that enables network security data analytics research.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.