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A SCIENCE OF CYBER-SECURITY?

Fred Schneider
Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science
Cornell University

Abstract:

Cyber-security today is focused largely on defending against known
attacks. We learn about the latest attack and find a patch to defend
against it. Our defenses thus improve only after they have been
successfully penetrated. This is a recipe to ensure some attackers
succeed---not a recipe for achieving system trustworthiness. We must
move beyond reacting to yesterday's attacks and instead start building
systems whose trustworthiness derives from first principles. Yet,
today we lack such a science base for cybersecurity. That science of
security would have to include attacks, defense mechanisms, and
security properties; its laws would characterize how these
relate. This talk will discuss examples of such laws and suggest
avenues for future exploration.


About the speaker:


Fred B. Schneider is Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at
Cornell University and chair of the department. He joined Cornell's
faculty in Fall 1978, having completed a Ph.D. at Stony Brook University
and a B.S. in Engineering at Cornell in 1975.

Schneider's research has focused on various aspects of trustworthy
systems --- systems that will perform as expected, despite failures and
attacks. His early work concerned formal methods to aid in the design
and implementation of concurrent and distributed systems that satisfy
their specifications. He is author of two texts on that subject: On
Concurrent Programming and (co-authored with D. Gries) A Logical
Approach to Discrete Mathematics. He is also known for his research in
theory and algorithms for building fault-tolerant distributed systems.
His paper on the "state machine approach" for managing replication
received (in 2007) an SOSP "Hall of Fame" award for seminal research.
More recently, his interests have turned to system security. His work
characterizing what policies can be enforced with various classes of
defenses is widely cited, and it is seen as advancing the nascent
science base for security. He is also engaged in research concerning
legal and economic measures for improving system trustworthiness.

Schneider was elected Fellow of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science (1992), the Association of Computing Machinery
(1995), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(2008). He was named Professor-at-Large at the University of Tromso
(Norway) in 1996 and was awarded a Doctor of Science honoris causa by
the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2003 for his work in computer
dependability and security. He received the 2012 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore
Award for "contributions to trustworthy computing through novel
approaches to security, fault-tolerance and formal methods for
concurrent and distributed systems". The U.S. National Academy of
Engineering elected Schneider to membership in 2011, and the Norges
Tekniske Vitenskapsakademi (Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences)
named him a foreign member in 2010.

Event Details

  • Yunshu Liu

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