2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Engineering Information: Adapting Risk and Resilience Frameworks to Cybersecurity

The Future of Computing The integration of computers and the internet (cyberspace) with the private sector, business, and government has been both a bane and a blessing. While it is relatively easy to remotely engage in malicious activity, steal valuable intellectual property, and put critical national infrastructures at risk, information technologies have had a strong positive effect on national economies. A huge volume of data is available to assess threat scenarios, vulnerabilities, and model consequences associated with potential attacks on complex engineered systems, yet our understanding of the threats affecting these systems remain uncertain. Escalating losses associated with unexpected events such as cyber-attacks have focused attention on new approaches to mitigating consequences. With the dominant paradigm of the past, it may be difficult to deal with emerging threats given paucity of relevant information on extensively interconnected systems. This symposium explores resilience as the guiding principle for assessing properties of the whole system, including physical, information, cognitive, and social domains. Our knowledge on threats, vulnerabilities, and consequences, while limited, can nevertheless guide design of systems to avoid future risks, provided that we apply an integrated approach. The dynamic nature of cyber-risks requires semiquantitative methods that integrate technical data with value judgments in a framework that can be deployed rapidly and is adaptive to new information.