Big Cyber – 2019

Keynote: Exploring the role of Big Data in Defensive Cyber Deception and Adaptive Moving Target Defenses

Dr. Sunny James Fugate, Ph.D.,
Senior Scientific Technical Manager for Cyber Warfare,
Cyber / Science & Technology Department,
Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific.

It is generally understood that cyberspace is a highly contested environment in which systems cannot be made perfectly secure and where attackers have a significant asymmetric advantage. Traditional cybersecurity approaches assume that with strong enough best practices, good cyber hygiene, boundary defenses, and traditional defense-in-depth that our systems can be sufficiently secure and protected.   We also tend to believe that collecting vast quantities of cyber data will allow us to see more and do more to defend systems.  While we have great examples from commercial industry on ways of using big data to guide automated systems for protecting users and information (such as spam filtering), overall, the role of big data in cyber defense is still in flux.  Not only is sharing cyber data made difficult due to policy and security constraints, but even when data is readily available, creating effective capabilities from raw data seems to be fraught with peril.

How do we know that the data that we have is correct?  Can we detect misdirection and poisoning attacks against data sets that we have collected or are using to train detection models? Addressing these challenges may require fundamentally re-thinking our approaches for defending systems — turning traditional defense and attack techniques on their heads and refocusing our efforts on robust methods which take both human and system into account.  This talk will introduce the audience to the Naval Information Warfare Systems Center and will describe a number of research efforts for creating defensible systems, for defending such systems against byzantine threats, and for leveraging human perception and cognition to guide automated defenses.  In particular, I will describe methods for performing active detection of attackers using intentional obfuscation, misdirection, and deception as well as learning from the perception and pattern recognition abilities of mere humans — techniques which utilize combinations of decentralization, obfuscation and defensive deception, game theory and strategic unpredictability, oppositional human factors, ambient displays and cyber wetware, and the layering of deceptive mazes that can cripple attacker progress, ferret them out, and immunize systems and networks while protecting both the security of users and providing better verifiability and awareness of the cyber environment.

Speaker biography – Sunny Fugate is the Senior Scientific and Technical Manager for Cyber Warfare at the Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific in San Diego, California.  Dr Fugate earned his PhD from the University of New Mexico in 2012 with a focus on adaptive threat detection and has supported the Naval Information Warfare Center, Pacific since 2002 where he leads research efforts for protecting computing systems and networks from attack and to better incorporate human factors and human cognition into our systems and defenses.  During his career, Dr Fugate has supported the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, the National Security Agency, Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Marine Forces Cyber Command, and US Cyber Command.  Dr Fugate’s research efforts have included AI and expert- system based network intrusion detection, network traffic analysis and visualization, the development of cyber common operational picture displays and implementing cyber symbology, moving target defenses, game theory of cyber defenses and cyber operations, understanding attacker cognition and undermining attacker cognition using the theory of oppositional human factors, and constructing and testing systems to perform defensive cyber deception. Dr Fugate is also a founding member of the Cybersecurity Technical Group of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, a board member and volunteer science educator for the League of Extraordinary Scientists, and Engineers, a ComicCon Panelist, and father of two boys.

Final schedule

Accepted Papers

1. Paul Maxwell, Elie Alhajjar, and Nathaniel Bastian, Intelligent Feature Engineering for Cybersecurity
2. Gabriel Mendonça, Gustavo Santos, Edmundo de Souza e Silva, Rosa Leão, Daniel Menasché, and Donald Towsley, An Extremely Lightweight Approach for DDoS Detection at Home Gateways
3. Taneeya Satyapanich, Tim Finin, and Francis Ferraro, Extracting Rich Semantic Information about Cybersecurity Events
4. Md. Shohel Rana and Andrew H. Sung, Deepfake Detection and Challenges – A Study
5. Candice Mitchell, Rajeev Agrawal, and Joshua Parker, The Effectiveness of Edge Centrality Measures for Anomaly Detection
6. Amine MRABET, Mehdi BENTOUNSI, and Patrice DARMON, SecP2I : A Secure Multi-party Discovery of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in Structured and Semi-structured Datasets
7. Eric Goodman and Dirk Grunwald, Streaming Temporal Graphs: Subgraph Matching
8. Shinelle Hutchinson, Bing Zhou, and Umit Karabiyik, Are We Really Protected? An Investigation into the Play Protect Service
9. Bruce Hartpence and Andres Kwasinski, Considering the Blackbox: An Investigation of Optimization Techniques with Completely Balanced Datasets of Packet Traffic

2019 Program Committee Members

• Chair: Karuna P Joshi, UMBC Site Director of CARTA I/UCRC, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA.
• Co-chair: Bhavani Thuraisingham, University of Texas, Dallas, USA
• Program Chair: Rajeev Agrawal, Engineer Research and Development Center, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
• Program Chair: Sudip Mittal, Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina Wilmington 
• George Roelke, Innovation Area Lead, Cyber, The MITRE Corporation
• Kouichi Sakurai, Kyushu University, Japan.
• Vijay Atluri, Research Director, Center for Information Management, Integration and Connectivity, Rutgers University, USA.
• Seung Geol Choi, Assistant Professor, United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, USA.
• Wenjia Li , Assistant Professor, New York Institute of Technology, USA
• Claudia Pearce, United States Department of Defense, USA.
• Sandeep Nair Narayanan, CISCO
• Maanak Gupta, Assistant Professor, Tennessee Tech University