Application of Cognitive Approaches to Cyber Security

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Background

The increasing reliance of industries, governments, and economies on cyber infrastructure makes them more-and-more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. In their most disruptive form, cyber-attacks target the enterprise, military, government, or other infrastructural resources of nations and their citizens. The volume and knowledge of cyber threats (malicious hacking, cyber warfare, cyber espionage, cyber terrorism, and cyber-crime) are increasing exponentially and this increase is problematic in the real world. Beyond problems present in web-applications, cyber criminals are getting smarter day-by-day. They find new ways to get into our systems, trick users of these systems, and damage or steal information in less time than we expect.

Currently, there are various technological solutions available to protect cyber infrastructure; however, research has paid less attention to the cognitive aspects affecting people who wage cyber-attacks (hackers), people who defend networks from such attacks (analysts), and people who are affected by such attacks (system users). Given that humans with their bounded cognition are the weakest link in the security chain, it is important to study the behavior and mental processes of hackers, analysts, and system users in situations involving cyber-attacks. Also, one needs to study how different stakeholders may trust their actions and technologies upon which they rely in the security chain.

This Research Topic is meant to focus on mental processes of hackers, analysts, and system users in the cyber world via both experimentation and computational modeling in order to understand their decision-making on account of cognitive limitations. This Research Topic will publish contributions containing state-of-the-art advances from major areas of cognition, focusing on sound empirical studies that advance our understanding of cognitive mechanisms and processes of human stakeholders in the cyber world. This Research Topic will help the cognitive science community to test theories, methods, and models in an applied cyber-security domain. Furthermore, the cyber-security field will benefit by the integration of cognitive theories and processes that explain how different stakeholders make decisions in the security chain. This integration will help cyber-security field to incorporate decision processes of stakeholders while developing technological solutions against cyber-attacks.

Areas
1. Situation Assessment and Decision Making
2. Game theory and cybersecurity
3. Deception in cybersecurity
4. Reliance on intrusion detection and prevention systems in cyber security
5. Motivational factors and network constraints in cyber security
6. Human-Assisted Decision Control
7. Human in the Loop
8. Instance-Based Learning
9. Situation Awareness in Cyber Physical Systems (CPS)
10. Cyber situation awareness via tools and techniques
11. Social Media Addiction
12. Cyberbullying
13. Cyber espionage
14. Detection of Insider attackers in any organization
15. Knowledge about cyber-attacks among experts and common users
16. Legal, social, and cultural security issues via cyber dependence
17. Cognitive cyber-security via experiments and computational modeling
18. Modeling individual differences in cyber security solutions
19. Application of biological/psychologically plausible computational models in cyber security
20. Trust Management Frameworks
21. Trust, Privacy and Anonymity Issues
22. Cyber Attack Scenarios
23. Risk Assessment and Decision Making
24. Law Enforcement and Surveillance
25. Computer Security and Usability

Keywords: cyber-attacks, cognition, hackers, analysts, system users

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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