Category Archives: Academic papers

A measurement of link rot: 57%

Academic papers, Cybercrime

I submitted my PhD on the 31st August 2005 (9 months before Twitter started, almost two years before the first iPhone). The easiest version to find (click here) contains the minor revisions requested by my examiners and some typographical changes to fit it into the Computer Lab’s Technical Report series.

Since it seemed like a good idea at the time, my thesis has an annotated bibliography (so you can read a brief precis of what I referenced, which could assist you in deciding whether to follow it up). I also went to some effort to identify online versions of everything I cited, because it always helpful to just click on a link and immediately see the paper, news article or other material.

The thesis has 153 references, in two cases I provided two URLs, and in three cases I could not provide any URL — though I did note that the three ITU standards documents I cited were available from the ITU bookshop and it was possible to download a small number of standards without charge. That is, the bibliography contained 152 URLs.
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Cambridge Cybercrime Centre: COVID briefing papers

Academic papers, Cybercrime

The current coronavirus pandemic has significantly disrupted all our societies and, we believe, it has also significantly disrupted cybercrime.

In the Cambridge Cybercrime Centre we collect crime-related datasets of many types and we expect, in due course, to be able to identify, measure and document this disruption. We will not be alone in doing so — a key aim of our centre is to make datasets available to other academic researchers so that they too can identify, measure and document. What’s more, we make this data available in a timely manner — sometimes before we have even looked at it ourselves!

When we have looked at the data and identified what might be changing (or where the criminals are exploiting new opportunities) then we shall of course be taking the traditional academic path of preparing papers, getting them peer reviewed, and then presenting them at conferences or publishing them in academic journals. However, that process is extremely slow — so we have decided to provide a faster route for getting out the message about what we find to be going on.

Our new series of “COVID Briefing Papers” are an ongoing series of short-form, open access reports aimed at academics, policymakers, and practitioners, which aim to provide an accessible summary of our ongoing research into the effects which the coronavirus pandemic (and government responses) are having on cybercrime. We’re hoping, at least for a while, to produce a new briefing paper each week … and you can now read the very first, where Ben Collier explains what has happened to illegal online drug markets… just click here!

Towards greater ecological validity in security usability

Academic papers, Authentication, Open-source security, Web security, ,

When you are a medical doctor, friends and family invariably ask you about their aches and pains. When you are a computer specialist, they ask you to fix their computer. About ten years ago, most of the questions I was getting from friends and family as a security techie had to do with frustration over passwords. I observed that what techies had done to the rest of humanity was not just wrong but fundamentally unethical: asking people to do something impossible and then, if they got hacked, blaming them for not doing it.



So in 2011, years before the Fido Alliance was formed (2013) and Apple announced its smartwatch (2014), I published my detailed design for a clean-slate password replacement I called Pico, an alternative system intended to be easier to use and more secure than passwords. The European Research Council was generous enough to fund my vision with a grant that allowed me to recruit and lead a team of brilliant researchers over a period of five years. We built a number of prototypes, wrote a bunch of papers, offered projects to a number of students and even launched a start-up and thereby learnt a few first-hand lessons about business, venture capital, markets, sales and the difficult process of transitioning from academic research to a profitable commercial product. During all those years we changed our minds a few times about what ought to be done and we came to understand a lot better both the problem space and the mindset of the users.

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Security and Human Behaviour 2020

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics, Security psychology, Usability

I’ll be liveblogging the workshop on security and human behaviour, which is online this year. My liveblogs will appear as followups to this post. This year my program co-chair is Alice Hutchings and we have invited a number of eminent criminologists to join us. Edited to add: here are the videos of the sessions.

How to jam neural networks

Academic papers, Security engineering

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been a very active field of research for eight years now, and for the last five we’ve seen a steady stream of adversarial examples – inputs that will bamboozle a DNN so that it thinks a 30mph speed limit sign is a 60 instead, and even magic spectacles to make a DNN get the wearer’s gender wrong.

So far, these attacks have targeted the integrity or confidentiality of machine-learning systems. Can we do anything about availability?

Sponge Examples: Energy-Latency Attacks on Neural Networks shows how to find adversarial examples that cause a DNN to burn more energy, take more time, or both. They affect a wide range of DNN applications, from image recognition to natural language processing (NLP). Adversaries might use these examples for all sorts of mischief – from draining mobile phone batteries, though degrading the machine-vision systems on which self-driving cars rely, to jamming cognitive radar.

So far, our most spectacular results are against NLP systems. By feeding them confusing inputs we can slow them down over 100 times. There are already examples in the real world where people pause or stumble when asked hard questions but we now have a dependable method for generating such examples automatically and at scale. We can also neutralize the performance improvements of accelerators for computer vision tasks, and make them operate on their worst case performance.

One implication is that engineers designing real-time systems that use machine learning will have to pay more attention to worst-case behaviour; another is that when custom chips used to accelerate neural network computations use optimisations that increase the gap between worst-case and average-case outcomes, you’d better pay even more attention.

Three Paper Thursday – Analysing social networks within underground forums

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Social networks, Three Paper Thursday,

One would be hard pressed to find an aspect of life where networks are not present. Interconnections are at the core of complex systems – such as society, or the world economy – allowing us to study and understand their dynamics. Some of the most transformative technologies are based on networks, be they hypertext documents making up the World Wide Web, interconnected networking devices forming the Internet, or the various neural network architectures used in deep learning. Social networks that are formed based on our interactions play a central role in our every day lives; they determine how ideas and knowledge spread and they affect behaviour. This is also true for cybercriminal networks present on underground forums, and social network analysis provides valuable insights to how these communities operate either on the dark web or the surface web.

For today’s post in the series `Three Paper Thursday’, I’ve selected three papers that highlight the valuable information we can learn from studying underground forums if we model them as networks. Network topology and large scale structure provide insights to information flow and interaction patterns. These properties along with discovering central nodes and the roles they play in a given community are useful not only for understanding the dynamics of these networks but for various purposes, such as devising disruption strategies.

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Cybercrime is (often) boring

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Security economics, Security psychology

Much has been made in the cybersecurity literature of the transition of cybercrime to a service-based economy, with specialised services providing Denial of Service attacks, cash-out services, escrow, forum administration, botnet management, or ransomware configuration to less-skilled users. Despite this acknowledgement of the ‘industrialisation’ of much for the cybercrime economy, the picture of cybercrime painted by law enforcement and media reports is often one of ’sophisticated’ attacks, highly-skilled offenders, and massive payouts. In fact, as we argue in a recent paper accepted to the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security this year (and covered in KrebsOnSecurity last week), cybercrime-as-a-service relies on a great deal of tedious, low-income, and low-skilled manual administrative work.

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Three Paper Thursday: Vulnerabilities! We’ve got vulnerabilities here! … See? Nobody cares.

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Programmable logic, Protocols, Security economics, Three Paper Thursday

Jurassic Park is often (mistakenly) left out of the hacker movie canon. It clearly demonstrated the risk of an insider attack on control systems (Velociraptor rampage, amongst other tragedies…) nearly a decade ahead of the Maroochy sewage incident, it’s the first film I know of with a digital troll (“ah, ah, ah, you didn’t say the magic word!”), and Samuel L. Jackson correctly assesses the possible consequence of a hard reset (namely, everyone dying), resulting in his legendary “Hold on to your butts”. The quotable mayhem is seeded early in the film, when biotech spy Lewis Dodgson gives a sack of money to InGen’s Dennis Nedry to steal some dino DNA. Dodgson’s caricatured OPSEC (complete with trilby and dark glasses) is mocked by Nedry shouting, “Dodgson! Dodgson! We’ve got Dodgson here! See, nobody cares…” Three decades later, this quote still comes to mind* whenever conventional wisdom doesn’t seem to square with observed reality, and today we’re going to apply it to the oft-maligned world of Industrial Control System (ICS) security.

There is plenty of literature on ICS security pre-2010, but people really sat up and started paying attention when we learned about Stuxnet. Possibly the most upsetting thing about Stuxnet (for security-complacent control system designers like me) was the apparent ease with which the “air gap” was bridged over and over again. Any remaining faith in the air gap was killed by Éireann Leverett’s demonstration (thesis and S4 presentation) that thousands of industrial systems were directly connected to the Internet — no air gap jumping required. Since then, we’ve observed a steady growth in Internet-connected ICS devices, due both to improved search techniques and increasingly-connectable ICS devices. On any given day you can find about 100,000 unique devices speaking industrial protocols on Censys and Shodan. These protocols are largely unauthenticated and unencrypted, allowing an attacker that can speak the protocol to remotely read state, issue commands, and even modify programmable logic without using an actual exploit.

This sounds (and is) bad, and people have (correctly) highlighted its badness on many occasions. The attacks, however, appear to be missing: we are not aware of a single instance of industrial damage initiated via an Internet-connected ICS device. In this Three Paper Thursday we’ll look at papers showing how easy it is to find and contextualise Internet-connected ICS devices, some evidence for lack of malicious interest, and some leading indicators that this happy conclusion (for which we don’t really deserve any credit) may be changing.

*Perhaps because guys of a certain age still laugh and say “Dodson! We’ve got Dodson here!” when they learn my surname. I try to explain that it’s spelt differently, but…
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Three Paper Thursday – GDPR anniversary edition

Academic papers, Legal issues, Politics, Privacy technology, Security economics, Three Paper Thursday

This is a guest contribution from Daniel Woods.

This coming Monday will mark two years since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. It prompted an initial wave of cookie banners that drowned users in assertions like “We value your privacy”. Website owners hoped that collecting user consent would ensure compliance and ward off the lofty fines.

Article 6 of the GDPR describes how organisations can establish a legal basis for processing personal data. Putting aside a selection of `necessary’ reasons for doing so, data processing can only be justified by collecting the user’s consent to “the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes”. Consequently, obtaining user consent could be the difference between suffering a dizzying fine or not.

The law changed the face of the web and this post considers one aspect of the transition. Consent Management Providers (CMPs) emerged offering solutions for websites to embed. Many of these use a technical standard described in the Transparency and Consent Framework. The standard was developed by the Industry Advertising Body, who proudly claim it is is “the only GDPR consent solution built by the industry for the industry”.

All of the following studies either directly measure websites implementing this standard or explore the theoretical implications of standardising consent. The first paper looks at how the design of consent dialogues shape the consent signal sent by users. The second paper identifies disparities between the privacy preferences communicated via cookie banners and the consent signals stored by the website. The third paper uses coalitional game theory to explore which firms extract the value from consent coalitions in which websites share consent signals.

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Three Paper Thursday: Exploring the Impact of Online Crime Victimization

Academic papers, Cybercrime, Security psychology, Three Paper Thursday

Just as in other types of victimization, victims of cybercrime can experience serious consequences, emotional or not. First of all, a repeat victim of a cyber-attack might face serious financial or emotional hardship. These victims are also more likely to require medical attention as a consequence of online fraud victimization. This means repeat victims have a unique set of support needs, including the need for counselling, and seeking support from the criminal justice system. There are also cases, such as in cyberbullying or sextortion, where victims will not speak to their family and friends. These victims feel too ashamed to share details with others and they will probably not receive any support. In such cases trauma can even lead to self-harm. Therefore, we see that online victimization can actually lead to physical harm. 

As a member of the National Risk Assessment (NRA) Behavioural Science Expert Group in the UK, working on the social and psychological impact of cyber-attacks on members of the public, I have identified for years now that the actual social or psychological impact of different types of cyber-attacks to victims or society as a whole is still not explored. Governments have been slow in identifying and analysing potential events online that may negatively impact individuals. In the UK, as well as in other countries, cybercrime has been added as part of a national risk assessment exercise only a few years ago. Therefore, our knowledge about the potential impact of cyber-attacks and their cascading effects are still being under research.  

This is often a very difficult area for lawyers and the courts to understand. Understanding victims’ needs and the responsibilities of the police, the judiciary and other authorities in dealing with such crimes is very important. This is why we need to further explore how and to what extent the situation and needs of victims of online crimes differ from those of traditional offline crimes. By sharing experiences and openly discussing about this issue, we will be able to engrain the cybersecurity mindset in our societies thus preventing victimization in some level. 

In this post I would like to introduce recent work in this area. The first one explores the social and psychological impact of cyber-attacks to individuals as well as nations, the second one explores the differences between the situation and needs of online and offline crime victims while the third one discusses the relationship between offending and victimization online.

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