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Fink, Glenn A

Publications and source records attributed to Fink, Glenn A.

Shopping For Danger: E-commerce techniques applied to collaboration in cyber security

Collaboration among cyber security analysts is essential to a successful protection strategy on the Internet today, but it is uncommonly practiced or encouraged in operating environments. Barriers to productive collaboration often include data sensitivity, time and effort to communicate, institutional policy, and protection of domain knowledge. We propose an ambient collaboration framework, Vulcan, designed to remove the barriers of time and effort and mitigate the others. Vulcan automated data collection, collaborative filtering, and asynchronous dissemination, eliminating the effort implied by explicit collaboration among peers. We instrumented two analytic applications and performed a mock analysis session to build a dataset and test the output of the system.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Ant-Based Cyber Security

We describe a swarming-agent-based, mixed-initiative approach to infrastructure defense where teams of humans and software agents defend cooperating organizations in tandem by sharing insights and solutions without violating proprietary boundaries. The system places human administrators at the appropriate level where they provide system guidance while lower-level agents carry out tasks humans are unable to perform quickly enough to mitigate today’s security threats. Cooperative Infrastructure Defense (CID) uses our ant-based approach to enable dialogue between humans and agents to foster a collaborative problem-solving environment, increase human situational awareness and influence using visualization and shared control. We discuss theoretical implementation characteristics along with results from recent proof-of-concept implementations.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Situational Awareness as a Measure of Performance in Cyber Security Collaborative Work

Cyber defense competitions arising from U.S. service academy exercises, offer a platform for collecting data that can inform research that ranges from characterizing the ideal cyber warrior to describing behaviors during certain challenging cyber defense situations. This knowledge in turn could lead to better preparation of cyber defenders in both military and civilian settings. We conducted proof of concept experimentation to collect data during the Pacific-rim Regional Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (PRCCDC) and analyzed it to study the behavior of cyber defenders. We propose that situational awareness predicts performance of cyber security professionals, and in this paper we focus on our collection and analysis of competition data to determine whether it supports our hypothesis. In addition to normal cyber data, we collected situational awareness and workload data and compared it against the performance of cyber defenders as indicated by their competition score. We conclude that there is a weak correlation between our measure of situational awareness and performance that we hope to exploit in further studies.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗