Cybersecurity Commons^™

Future Trends In Cybersecurity: A Meta-Review, Yara Mohammed, Manar Alsaid, Gahangir Hossain

Faculty Publications

The increasing importance of cybersecurity in protecting digital assets, data and infrastructures necessitates a reevaluation of research priorities within the discipline. As of today, numerous emerging cybersecurity topics are gaining significant importance in both academic research and industry applications. To identify recent trends in cybersecurity topics, this study extracts scholarly articles from two prestigious academic databases, the ACM Digital Library, and Google Scholar, covering the period from early 2015 to late 2024.Through a systematic identification of trends and focal points in cybersecurity research, a comprehensive analysis is facilitated, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), Biterm Topic Modeling (BTM), keyword frequencies, and …

Better Digital Contracts With Prosocial Friction-In-Design, Brett Frischmann, Moshe Y. Vardi

Faculty Publications

Contract law is supposed to enable people to reach genuine agreements and cooperate. If this ideal was ever a reality, the rise of mass market contracts and boil­erplate rendered it pure fiction. Modern consumer contracts are incomprehensible to most people. No one reads them anyway.

Digital contracting involves design features that amplify traditional boilerplate harms and create others. For example, digital contracting is too cheap; low marginal costs lead to overexpansion in scale and scope. To make matters worse, the loss of autonomy from repeat engagement with digital contracting systems is pernicious. People become increasingly predictable and programmable as digital …

Microarchitectural Malware Detection Via Translation Lookaside Buffer (Tlb) Events, Cristian Agredo, Daniel F. Koranek, Christine M. Schubert Kabban, Jose R. Gutierrez Del Arroyo, Scott R. Graham

Faculty Publications

Prior work has shown that Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) data contains valuable behavioral information. Many existing methodologies rely on timing features or focus solely on workload classification. In this study, we propose a novel approach to malware classification using only TLB-related Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs), explicitly excluding any dependence on timing features such as task execution duration or memory access timing. Our methodology evaluates whether TLB data alone, without any timing information, can effectively distinguish between malicious and benign programs. We test this across three classification scenarios: (1) A binary classification problem involving distinguishing malicious from benign tasks, (2) a …

Exploring The Translation Lookaside Buffer (Tlb) For Low-Level Task Differentiation And Classification, Cristian Agredo, Daniel F. Koranek, Christine M. Schubert, Jose A. Gutierrez Del Arroyo, Tor J. Langehaug, Scott R. Graham

Faculty Publications

The primary focus of modern Central Processing Unit (CPU) technologies is performance improvement, with security often considered a secondary concern. As a result, vulnerabilities within the system are overlooked. While significant research, both offensive and defensive, has been conducted on CPU caches, relatively little attention has been given to the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) due to its perceived lack of data granularity. Prior studies have typically combined multiple Hardware Performance Counters (HPCs) or relied on timing analysis to extract meaningful insights. In contrast, this study introduces a novel methodology that leverages only TLB related HPCs for multi-task classification, without incorporating …

Using Timing-Based Side Channels For Anomaly Detection In Industrial Control Systems, Stephen Dunlap, Jonathan W. Butts, Juan L. Lopez Jr., Mason J. Rice, Barry E. Mullins

Faculty Publications

The critical infrastructure, which includes the electric power grid, railroads and water treatment facilities, is dependent on the proper operation of industrial control systems. However, malware such as Stuxnet has demonstrated the ability to alter industrial control system parameters to create physical effects. Of particular concern is malware that targets embedded devices that monitor and control system functionality, while masking the actions from plant operators and security analysts. Indeed, system security relies on guarantees that the assurance of these devices can be maintained throughout their lifetimes. This paper presents a novel approach that uses timing-based side channel analysis to establish …

Design And Analysis Of A Dynamically Configured Log-Based Distributed Security Event Detection Methodology, Michael R. Grimaila, Justin M. Myers, Robert F. Mills, Gilbert L. Peterson

Faculty Publications

Military and defense organizations rely upon the security of data stored in, and communicated through, their cyber infrastructure to fulfill their mission objectives. It is essential to identify threats to the cyber infrastructure in a timely manner, so that mission risks can be recognized and mitigated. Centralized event logging and correlation is a proven method for identifying threats to cyber resources. However, centralized event logging is inflexible and does not scale well, because it consumes excessive network bandwidth and imposes significant storage and processing requirements on the central event log server. In this paper, we present a flexible, distributed event …

An Empirical Analysis Of The Cascade Error Reconciliation Protocol For Quantum Key Distribution, Timothy I. Calver, Michael R. Grimaila, Jeffrey W. Humphries

Faculty Publications

Modern cryptography provides the means to securely communicate data between authorized entities by using mathematical transformations which require pre-shared cryptographic keys. The need to share key material with authorized entities in a secure, cost efficient and timely manner has driven efforts to develop new key distribution methods. A promising method is Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) which is considered to be “unconditionally secure” because it relies upon the immutable laws of quantum physics rather than computational complexity as the basis for its security. An important component of any QKD system is the error reconciliation protocol which is used to identify and …