| Speaker: | Shouhuai Xu, University of Texas at San Antonio | |
| When: | April 22, 2019, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm | |
| Where: | Research Hall, Suite 417 | |
For decades, computer and information security research has been driven by fundamental concepts such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Despite the tremendous accomplishments, cybersecurity is still largely an Art. What concepts will drive the research to elevate this Art to Science of cybersecurity? Our research has led to a unique approach, dubbed Cybersecurity Dynamics, by which we aim to build a systematic foundation for modeling, analyzing, and quantifying cybersecurity from a holistic perspective. Under the umbrella of this framework, our research has been focusing on three thrusts, which we call a systematic “x-y-z-t coordinate system” as a metaphor. At a high level, the x-axis represents first-principle modeling (analogous to Theoretical Physics research for understanding the Universe), the y-axis represents data analytics (analogous to Experimental Physics research), the z-axis represents metrics (analogous to defining notions such as Mass and Energy), and the t-axis represents time (meaning that “things” in cyberspace evolve over time). The framework is inherently multidisciplinary because it cuts across many disciplines, including Computer Science, Applied Mathematics (e.g., Dynamical Systems, Control Theory, and Game Theory), Statistics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Statistical Physics, Complexity Science, Systems Science, Network Science, and Social Sciences. In this talk, I will review the Cybersecurity Dynamics framework, highlight some results, and discuss future research directions.
Shouhuai Xu is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). He is the founding Director of the Laboratory for Cybersecurity Dynamics at UTSA. He is interested in both fundamental and practical cybersecurity research. His research has been funded by AFOSR (including MURI), AFRL, ARL, ARO, NSF (including Large) and ONR. He co-initiated the International Conference on Science of Cyber Security a nd the ACM Scalable Trusted Computing Workshop (ACM STC). He is/was a Program Committee co-chair of SciSec’19, SciSec’18, ICICS’18, NSS’15 and Inscrypt’13. He has served on the Program Committees of numerous international conferences. He is/was an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (IEEE TDSC), IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (IEEE T-IFS), and IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (IEEE TNSE). He received his PhD in Computer Science from Fudan University.