Towards a science of trust

Pavlović, Duško

doi:10.1145/2746194.2746197

Cited by 7 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Nonetheless, proving the absence of failure modes or the presence of security properties is an important part of cryptography, formal methods, etc. (8)…”

Section: Other Approaches To Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Unfalsifiability of security claims

Herley

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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There is an inherent asymmetry in computer security: Things can be declared insecure by observation, but not the reverse. There is no observation that allows us to declare an arbitrary system or technique secure. We show that this implies that claims of necessary conditions for security (and sufficient conditions for insecurity) are unfalsifiable. This in turn implies an asymmetry in self-correction: Whereas the claim that countermeasures are sufficient is always subject to correction, the claim that they are necessary is not. Thus, the response to new information can only be to ratchet upward: Newly observed or speculated attack capabilities can argue a countermeasure in, but no possible observation argues one out. Further, when justifications are unfalsifiable, deciding the relative importance of defensive measures reduces to a subjective comparison of assumptions. Relying on such claims is the source of two problems: once we go wrong we stay wrong and errors accumulate, and we have no systematic way to rank or prioritize measures.A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is nonscientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. (1) K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations

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“…Nonetheless, proving the absence of failure modes or the presence of security properties is an important part of cryptography, formal methods, etc. (8)…”

Section: Other Approaches To Securitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Unfalsifiability of security claims

Herley

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…The practice is far ahead of theory. The research reported in this paper is a part of a broader effort [9,31,33,34,47] towards developing models, methods, and tools for this area, where human and computational behaviors are not just inseparable, but they determine each other; and they do not just determine each other, but they seek to control each other.…”

Section: Causal Cognition As a Security Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Causality and deceit: Do androids watch action movies?

Pavlovic,

Pavlovic

2019

Preprint

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We seek causes through science, religion, and in everyday life. We get excited when a big rock causes a big splash, and we get scared when it tumbles without a cause. But our causal cognition is usually biased. The why is influenced by the who. It is influenced by the self, and by others. We share rituals, we watch action movies, and we influence each other to believe in the same causes. Human mind is packed with subjectivity because shared cognitive biases bring us together. But they also make us vulnerable.An artificial mind is deemed to be more objective than the human mind. After many years of science-fiction fantasies about even-minded androids, they are now sold as personal or expert assistants, as brand advocates, as policy or candidate supporters, as network influencers. Artificial agents have been stunningly successful in disseminating artificial causal beliefs among humans. As malicious artificial agents continue to manipulate human cognitive biases, and deceive human communities into ostensive but expansive causal illusions, the hope for defending us has been vested into developing benevolent artificial agents, tasked with preventing and mitigating cognitive distortions inflicted upon us by their malicious cousins. Can the distortions of human causal cognition be corrected on a more solid foundation of artificial causal cognition?In the present paper, we study a simple model of causal cognition, viewed as a quest for causal models. We show that, under very mild and hard to avoid assumptions, there are always self-confirming causal models, which perpetrate self-deception, and seem to preclude a royal road to objectivity.

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“…I N the past decade there has been significant effort in adding formal underpinnings to security [1], [2]. This research trajectory is evidenced by the NSF/IARPA/NSA workshop on the science of security, which underlines that there are three areas in need of innovation: metrics, formal methods, and experimentation [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Yoneda Hacking: The Algebra of Attacker Actions

Bakirtzis¹,

Genovese²,

Fleming³

2021

Preprint

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Our work focuses on modeling security of systems from their component-level designs. Towards this goal we develop a categorical formalism to model attacker actions. Equipping the categorical formalism with algebras produces two interesting results for security modeling. First, using the Yoneda lemma, we are able to model attacker reconnaissance missions. In this context, the Yoneda lemma formally shows us that if two system representations, one being complete and the other being the attacker's incomplete view, agree at every possible test, then they behave the same. The implication is that attackers can still successfully exploit the system even with incomplete information. Second, we model the possible changes that can occur to the system via an exploit. An exploit either manipulates the interactions between system components, for example, providing the wrong values to a sensor, or changes the components themselves, for example, manipulating the firmware of a global positioning system (GPS). One additional benefit of using category theory is that mathematical operations can be represented as formal diagrams, which is useful for applying this analysis in a model-based design setting. We illustrate this modeling framework using a cyber-physical system model of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). We demonstrate and model two types of attacks (1) a rewiring attack, which violates data integrity, and (2) a rewriting attack, which violates availability.

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Towards a science of trust

Cited by 7 publications

References 29 publications

Unfalsifiability of security claims

Unfalsifiability of security claims

Causality and deceit: Do androids watch action movies?

Yoneda Hacking: The Algebra of Attacker Actions

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