Vulnerabilities and responsibilities: dealing with monsters in computer security

Pieters, Wolter; Consoli, Luca

doi:10.1108/14779960911004499

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 33 publications

(32 reference statements)

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“…the Needham-Schroeder protocol; Lowe 1996 ). The issue is that we often fail to identify types of exceptional circumstances that have not yet caused security problems ( Pieters and Consoli 2009 ). Only when new types of issues become generally known do they become part of security verification and testing.…”

Section: Security Metrics and Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophy of Security Engineering

Pieters¹

2020

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering

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Technology can contribute to undesirable events, or prevention thereof, in many ways. Technology can be a causal factor in floods, weaponized attacks, nuclear incidents, and cybercrime. Dikes, security cameras, nuclear safety systems, and data encryption are technologies aimed at protection against such incidents. The associated events are labeled undesirable because they involve some kind of harm to some (human or non-human) actors or systems.In this context, security is generally understood as different from safety, but there are various interpretations of this distinction. The most common definition appears to be that security is the protection against deliberately caused events (e.g. Burns et al. 1992 ;Piètre-Cambacédès and Chaudet 2009 ). This implies that there are actors (adversaries) that have an interest in causing these events. In the aforementioned examples, this would apply to weaponized attacks and cybercrime, as in both cases harm is caused intentionally. In financial cybercrime, there is monetary benefit for the adversaries associated with the harm caused to others; in weaponized terrorist attacks the benefits to the adversaries are immaterial (although material harm may be caused).Technology and engineering can play at least two different roles in security against such adversarial acts. Firstly, the design and deployment of technologies may have implications for security, in the sense that they may increase (or decrease) the risk of deliberately caused harmful events. Weapons are an obvious example, but also technologies that at first sight seem to benefit society may be used to cause harm. An important example is the impact of computer networks and the Internet ("cyberspace") on new forms of crime and even terrorism ( Koops 2010 ). When security is taken into account in the design of such technologies, engineers may want to think of ways to reduce such undesirable forms of use. Secondly, to prevent security threats such as crime and terrorism, both online and offline, technologies are often designed specifically to mitigate these threats by preventing, detecting, or responding to them. For example, physical fences as well as digital firewalls may be deployed to limit access of adversaries to facilities. Surveillance cameras or Internet monitoring systems may be put in place to detect threats. It may be hard to assess the effectiveness of such technologies against security threats, and they may also have side effects on other values ( Hildebrandt 2013 ), of which privacy is often mentioned, in particular concerning surveillance technologies.In this contribution, we cover the foundational concepts of security risk, and how this materializes (or fails to materialize) in engineering practices. To this end, we draw on literature from philosophy, criminology, and engineering disciplines, with a focus on computer science and cybersecurity.The key philosophical topics that we address are (1) ontologies of security and security risk in relation

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Section: Security Metrics and Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Philosophy of Security Engineering

Pieters¹

2020

The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Engineering

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“…There are also discussions about the theoretical and computational science of exploit techniques and proposals to do explicit parsing and normalization of inputs [11,25,16,24]. Bratus et al [11] discuss "weird machines" and the view that the theoretical language aspects of computer science lie at the heart of practical computer security problems, especially exploitable vulnerabilities.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Information Flow-Based Taxonomy to Understand the Nature of Software Vulnerabilities

Oliveira¹,

Crandall²,

Kalodner³

et al. 2016

IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology

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Despite the emphasis on building secure software, the number of vulnerabilities found in our systems is increasing every year, and well-understood vulnerabilities continue to be exploited. A common response to vulnerabilities is patch-based mitigation, which does not completely address the flaw and is often circumvented by an adversary. The problem actually lies in a lack of understanding of the nature of vulnerabilities. Vulnerability taxonomies have been proposed, but their usability is limited because of their ambiguity and complexity. This paper presents a taxonomy that views vulnerabilities as fractures in the interpretation of information as it flows in the system. It also presents a machine learning study validating the taxonomy's unambiguity. A manually labeled set of 641 vulnerabilities trained a classifier that automatically categorized more than 70000 vulnerabilities from three distinct databases with an average success rate of 80%. Important lessons learned are discussed such as (i) approximately 12% of the studied reports provide insufficient information about vulnerabilities, and (ii) the roles of the reporter and developer are not leveraged, especially regarding information about tools used to find vulnerabilities and approaches to address them.

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“…From a security-by-design point of view, one may search for known types of vulnerabilities, but it is hard to find the unknown ones, those that transcend existing (cultural) classification systems [4,6,34]. In such a context, complete design-time security may be impossible due to the limitations of human perception and imagination.…”

Section: Advantages Of the Paradigmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cyber Security as Social Experiment

Pieters

Hadžiosmanović

Dechesne³

2014

Proceedings of the 2014 New Security Paradigms Workshop

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Lessons from previous experiences are often overlooked when deploying security-sensitive technology in the real world. At the same time, security assessments often suffer from a lack of real-world data. This appears similar to general problems in technology assessment, where knowledge about (side-)effects of a new technology often only appears when it is too late. In this context, the paradigm of new technologies as social experiments was proposed, to achieve more conscious and gradual deployment of new technologies, without losing the ability to steer the developments or make changes in designs. In this paper, we propose to apply the paradigm of new technologies as social experiments to security-sensitive technologies. This new paradigm achieves (i) inherent attention for the ethics of deploying securitysensitive systems in the real world, and (ii) more systematic extraction of real-world security data and feedback into decision making processes.

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Vulnerabilities and responsibilities: dealing with monsters in computer security

Cited by 8 publications

References 33 publications

Philosophy of Security Engineering

Philosophy of Security Engineering

An Information Flow-Based Taxonomy to Understand the Nature of Software Vulnerabilities

Cyber Security as Social Experiment

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