Background and Scope:

A combination of cyber technological feasibility and economic viability drives many of the decisions related to cybersecurity by both the defenders and attackers. In this context, technological feasibility is defined as any cyber resiliency technology that has the potential to be developed, fielded, and operationally controlled. In the case of economic viability, the resources required to defend or attack must be available. We define resources in its broadest sense to include but not limited to the people, equipment, training, required funding, and asset value. On the defensive side, these technological and economic factors determine the cyber security and resiliency policies, procedure and technologies implemented to prevent and respond to cyber-attacks. On the offensive side, they not only determines the type of attack but also the effort expended to ensure its success. In short, these and other factors determine the asymmetric balance between the attackers and defenders.

The CRE18 Workshop on Cyber Resilience Technologies, Their Benefits and Measurements will explore foundational and applied advances in cyber resiliency policies and technologies to achieve an asymmetric balance, and identify and quantify the effect economics has on the decision process. To do so, the workshop will seek to understand the capabilities, strengths/weaknesses, and benefits of various resiliency technologies. In addition it will attempt to address the metrics needed to measure their technical and economic effectiveness in addressing the asymmetric disparity between defender and attacker. The workshop will examine the parameters needed to accurately quantify asymmetric imbalance from both the offensive and defensive perspective; examine technical and non-technical approaches to shifting that balance, including the full range of costs/benefits of each approach; and explore and evaluate a range of options for defining and achieving optimality. It will bring together a diverse group of experts from multiple fields to advance the concepts, analysis and application of cost, value, risk and other important features of cyber systems as related to asymmetric advantage and cyber resiliency. This will serve to accelerate the recognition, adoption and application of cyber resilience within industry, government and academia by addressing the key concerns of how these techniques and technologies can be realized within the practical constraints of cost, risk, and benefit.

Information for Authors:

We are currently seeking manuscripts for a full-day workshop that will be a forum to discuss recent research in areas associated with cyber resilience economics. Manuscripts should be submitted in the IEEE standard conference format of 8 pages maximum in the specific topics of interest to include, but not limited to:
• Cyber Resiliency technologies
• Benefits and weaknesses of cyber resiliency technologies
• Foundations of asymmetric cyber advantage
• Integrated analyses of cyber resiliency & asymmetry with cyber environments
• Metrics, measures, and economics of cyber resiliency & asymmetry
• Policies and procedures related to the development, deployment and use of cyber resiliency technologies
• Defining practical cyber resiliency
• Technical & architectural approaches to gaining asymmetric advantage
• Relationship between resiliency and security
• Adversary economics: assessing the impact of defender capabilities and actions to the attacker
• Frameworks for ROI analysis (cost, risk, benefit) to guide technology investment (research, development, and utilization)
• Cyber-resiliency related tools that are guided by economic factors for defender and/or adversary
• Use cases or case studies for defender and/or adversary that include economic factors

In light of the interactions and interdependencies of today’s cyber infrastructures, the scope of this workshop is to explore the above topics across the full spectrum of cyber systems to include traditional IT, cloud platforms, cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things, operational technologies, and critical infrastructure.

Chairs:
Nick Multari (PNNL) nick.multari@pnnl.gov
Jeffrey Picciotto (MITRE) jp@mitre.org

Key Dates:
Manuscripts Due: April 13, 2018 (firm) (http://banana.utdallas.edu/qrs2018/start/www/CRE/) Author Notification: May 15, 2018
Camera-ready dues: June 1, 2018
Workshop: July 16-20, 2018