Skip to main content
Author(s):
Shouhuai Xu
Conference Name
ACM
Abstract

The Cybersecurity Dynamics framework offers an approach to systematically understanding, characterizing, quantifying and managing cybersecurity from a holistic perspective. The framework looks into cyberspace through the dynamics lens because environments in cyberspace often evolve with time (e.g., software vulnerabilities, attack capabilities, defense capabilities, and cybersecurity states). The dynamics lens offers a unique viewpoint, which guides the modeling of the various situations which evolve with respect to cybersecurity. This type of evolution is driven by attackers, defenders, and users of related systems and is manifested by their attack/defense/use activities. Since its inception in 2014, there has been significant progress in characterizing and taming various kinds of cybersecurity dynamics. In this paper we discuss the landscape and way-of-thinking that guide the Cybersecurity Dynamics model, including two killer applications and the technical barriers that serve as outstanding open problems for future research.

Concluding remarks
We have described the Cybersecurity Dynamics way of thinking, which highlights a paradigm shift from time-independence to timedependence. The time-dependent nature of cybersecurity leads to the perspective of dynamics. We have described the Cybersecurity Dynamics landscape via a dynamics layer for characterizing cybersecurity and supporting various cybersecurity functions. We hope this paper will inspire many researchers to tackle the range
of outstanding open problems discussed in the paper. We believe that these open problems, especially the technical barriers, are inherent, meaning that they must be tackled regardless of specific approaches.

Reference details

DOI
10.1145/3411496.3421225
Resource type
Conference Proceedings
Year of Conference
2020
Publication Area
Cybersecurity and defense
Date Published
2020-11-09

How to cite this reference:

Xu, S. (2020). The Cybersecurity Dynamics Way of Thinking and Landscape. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411496.3421225 (Original work published)