Engineering Information: Adapting Risk and Resilience Frameworks to Cybersecurity

The Future of Computing
Friday, 13 February 2015: 1:30 PM-4:30 PM
Room 230A (San Jose Convention Center)
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.
Organizer:
Sankar Basu, National Science Foundation
Co-Organizer:
Igor Linkov, U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center
Discussant:
Celia Merzbacher,  VP for Innovative Partnerships, Semiconductor Research Corporation
Speakers:
Shankar Sastry, University of California, Berkeley
Resilient Cyber Physical Systems
John E. Savage, Brown University
The Cyberspace Challenge
Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Technical University of Darmstadt
The Internet of Beasty Things: Challenges in Embedded Systems
Stephanie Forrest, University of New Mexico
The Complex Science of Cyber-Defense
Ken Heffner, Honeywell International Inc.
Cyber Resiliency: An Industry Perspective
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