JASON: SCIENCE OF CYBER SECURITY NEEDS MORE WORK
“Cyber security is now critical to our survival but as a field of research [it] does not have a firm scientific basis,” according to the Department of Defense. “Our current security approaches have had limited success and have become an arms race with our adversaries. In order to achieve security breakthroughs we need a more fundamental understanding of the science of cyber security.”
To help advance that understanding, the DoD turned to the JASON defense advisory panel, which has just produced a new report (pdf) on the subject.
“There is a science of cyber security,” the JASONs said, but it “seems underdeveloped in reporting experimental results, and consequently in the ability to use them.”
The JASON report began by noting that “A science of cyber security has to deal with a combination of peculiar features that are shared by no other area of study.”
“First, the background on which events occur is almost completely created by humans and is digital. That is, people built all the pieces. One might have thought that computers, their software, and networks were therefore completely understandable. The truth is that the cyber-universe is complex well beyond anyone's understanding and exhibits behavior that no one predicted, and sometimes can't even be explained well [after the fact],” the report said.
Continue reading “Secrecy News Extract: JASONS on Cyber-Security”
