Josiah Dykstra - Essential Cybersecurity Science: Build, Test, and Evaluate Secure Systems

The first three chapters contain general information about the scientific method as it applies across many domains of cybersecurity. They cover the basic tenets of science, the need for science in cybersecurity, and the methodology for scientific investigation. includes practical details about experimentation including test environments and open datasets.

The remaining chapters are organized into standalone, domain-specific topics. You can read them individually, although new scientific topics and techniques in these chapters are applicable to other domains. These chapters explore how the scientific method can be applied to the specific topics and challenges of each domain. Each topic chapter contains an overview of the scientific pursuits in that domain, one instructive example of a scientific experiment in that field, introduction of an analysis method (which can be applied to other domains), and a practical example of a simple, introductory experiment in that field that walks through the application of the scientific method.

• is about cybersecurity science for software assurance, including fuzzing and adversarial models.

• covers intrusion detection and incident response, and introduces error rates (false positives and false negatives) and performance/scalability/stress testing.

• focuses on the application of science to cyber situational awareness, especially using machine learning and big data.

• covers cryptography and the benefits and limitations of provably secure cybersecurity.

• is about digital forensics including scientific reproducibility and repeatability.

• , on malware analysis, introduces game theory and malware clustering.

• discusses building and evaluating dependable systems with security engineering.

• covers empirical experimentation for human-computer interaction and security usability.

• includes techniques for the experimental evaluation of security visualization.

provides some additional information about evaluating scientific claims, especially from vendors, and how people can be misled, manipulated, or deceived by real or bogus science. There is also a list of clarifying questions that you can use with salespeople, researchers, and product developers to probe the methodology they used.