Shouhuai of University of Texas, San Antonio

For decades, Computer and Information Security research has been driven by fundamental concepts such as Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. Despite the tremendous effort, security is still largely an art (except for sub-fields that include Cryptography). What concepts will drive the research towards fulfilling the Science of Cybersecurity? In this talk, I will describe an innovative concept, called Cybersecurity Dynamics, which naturally leads to a systematic framework for modeling, analyzing, and quantifying cybersecurity from a holistic perspective. The framework offers a systematic x-y-z-t “coordinate system” for exploring cybersecurity, where the x-axis represents first-principle modeling, the y-axis represents data analytics, the z-axis represents metrics, and the t-axis represents time (meaning that everything evolves over time). The framework is multidisciplinary because it cuts across disciplines including Computer Science (including Security), Applied Mathematics (broadly defined, including Stochastic Processes, Dynamical Systems, Control Theory, Game Theory), Statistics, Statistical Physics, Complexity Science, and Network Science. I will highlight the basic ideas underlying the framework, and outline some inherent technical barriers that must be tackled before achieving the ultimate goal. Please refer to http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~shxu/socs/index.html for more information about this exciting research endeavor.

Biography:

Shouhuai Xu is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at San Antonio. He is the founding Director of the Laboratory for Cybersecurity Dynamics (http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~shxu). His research is primarily in making cyberspace secure and trustworthy. He is interested in both theoretical modeling and analysis of cybersecurity and devising practical cyber defense solutions. His research has been funded by AFOSR, ARL, ARO, NSF and ONR. He co-initiated theInternational Conference on Science of Cyber Security (http://www.sci-cs.net/), the first edition of which (SciSec’2018) will be held in Beijing, August 12-14, 2018.  He also co-initiated the ACM Scalable Trusted Computing Workshop (ACM STC). He is/was a Program Committee co-chair of ICICS’18, NSS’15 and Inscrypt’13. He has served on the Program Committees of numerous international conferences. He was/is 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.