The alarming rise in the quantity of malware in the last few years poses a serious challenge to the security community and requires urgent response. However, current countermeasures seem to be no longer effective. Thus, it is our belief that it is now time for researchers and security experts to turn to nature in the search for novel inspirations for defense systems. Nature has provided species with a whole range of offensive and defensive techniques, which have been developing and improving in the course of billions of years of evolution. The extremely diverse living conditions have promoted a large variation in the devised bio-security solutions. In this paper we introduce a novel PROTECTION framework in which common denominators of the encountered offensive and defensive means are proposed and presented. The bio-inspired solutions are discussed in the context of cybersecurity, where some principles have already been adopted. The deployment of the whole nature-based framework should aid the design and improvement process of modern cyber-defense systems.
Current network security systems are progressively showing their limitations. One credible estimate is that only about 45% of new threats are detected. Therefore it is vital to find a new direction that cybersecurity development should follow. We argue that the next generation of cybersecurity systems should seek inspiration in nature. This approach has been used before in the first generation of cybersecurity systems; however, since then cyber threats and environment have evolved significantly, and accordingly the first-generation systems have lost their effectiveness. A next generation of bi…
Given the ongoing "arms race" in cybersecurity, the shortage of skilled professionals in this field is one of the strongest in computer science. The currently unmet staffing demand in cybersecurity is estimated at over 3 million jobs worldwide. Furthermore, the qualifications of the existing workforce are largely believed to be insufficient. We attempt to gain deeper insights into the nature of the current skill gap in cybersecurity. To this end, we correlate data from job ads and academic curricula using two kinds of skill characterizations: manual definitions from established skill framework…
LLM agents security duality: a comprehensive survey of self-security and empowered cybersecurity
School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Wuhan University（武汉大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo（布法罗大学计算机科学与工程系）
Learning to Detect Cyber Attacks: Neural Anomaly Detection for Cybersecurity with Theoretical Insights
Data Science Institute, Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学数据科学研究所）；School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院网络安全与隐私学院）；H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院H·米尔顿·斯图尔特工业与系统工程学院）
A significant limitation of current cyber security research and techniques is its reactive and applied nature. This leads to a continuous 'cyber cycle' of attackers scanning networks, developing exploits and attacking systems, with defenders detecting attacks, analyzing exploits and patching systems. This reactive nature leaves sensitive systems highly vulnerable to attack due to un-patched systems and undetected exploits. Some current research attempts to address this major limitation by introducing systems that implement moving target defense. However, these ideas are typically based on the …
Safety is becoming cybersecurity under most circumstances. This should be reflected in the Cybersecurity Resilience Act when it is proposed and agreed upon in the European Union. In this paper, we define a range of principles which this future Act should build upon, a structure and argue why it should be as broad as possible. It is based on what the cybersecurity research community for long have asked for, and on what constitutes clear hard legal rules instead of soft. Important areas such as cybersecurity should be taken seriously, by regulating it in the same way we see other types of critic…
Research ethics in Information and Communications Technology has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years. Although a number of general ethics standards have been issued, cyber security specifically has yet to see one. Furthermore, such standards are often abstract, lacking in guidance on specific practices. In this paper we compare peer-reviewed ethical analyses of condemned research papers to analyses derived from a knowledge base (KB) of concrete cyber security research ethics best practices. The KB we employ was compiled in prior work from a large random survey of research papers. W…
The prominence and use of the concept of cyber risk has been rising in recent years. This paper presents empirical investigations focused on two important and distinct groups within the broad community of cyber-defense professionals and researchers: (1) cyber practitioners and (2) developers of cyber ontologies. The key finding of this work is that the ways the concept of cyber risk is treated by practitioners of cybersecurity is largely inconsistent with definitions of cyber risk commonly offered in the literature. Contrary to commonly cited definitions of cyber risk, concepts such as the lik…
Cyber defense is reactive and slow. On average, the time-to-remedy is hundreds of times larger than the time-to-compromise. In response to the expanding ever-more-complex threat landscape, Digital Twins (DTs) and particularly Human Digital Twins (HDTs) offer the capability of running massive simulations across multiple knowledge domains. Simulated results may offer insights into adversaries' behaviors and tactics, resulting in better proactive cyber-defense strategies. For the first time, this paper solidifies the vision of DTs and HDTs for cybersecurity via the Cybonto conceptual framework pr…
SoK: The Pitfalls of Deep Reinforcement Learning for Cybersecurity
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Cardiff University（卡迪夫大学）；KU Leuven（鲁汶大学）；Devotion AI Labs（Devotion AI 实验室）
Computer users are generally faced with difficulties in making correct security decisions. While an increasingly fewer number of people are trying or willing to take formal security training, online sources including news, security blogs, and websites are continuously making security knowledge more accessible. Analysis of cybersecurity texts can provide insights into the trending topics and identify current security issues as well as how cyber attacks evolve over time. These in turn can support researchers and practitioners in predicting and preparing for these attacks. Comparing different sou…
New York University（纽约大学）；Universität Klagenfurt（克拉根福大学）；Joanneum Research（乔安诺姆研究公司）；Alias Robotics（Alias Robotics公司）
Robotics is becoming more and more ubiquitous, but the pressure to bring systems to market occasionally goes at the cost of neglecting security mechanisms during the development, deployment or while in production. As a result, contemporary robotic systems are vulnerable to diverse attack patterns, and an a posteriori hardening is at least challenging, if not impossible at all. This book aims to stipulate the inclusion of security in robotics from the earliest design phases onward and with a special focus on the cost-benefit tradeoff that can otherwise be an inhibitor for the fast development o…
Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI in Cybersecurity and Privacy: A Survey of Dual-Use Risks, AI-Generated Malware, Explainability, and Defensive Strategies
Virelya Intelligence Research Labs（Virelya智能研究实验室）；Google（谷歌）
