International Workshop on Cyber Deception and Defense addresses threats and countermeasures

The advent of the Internet has spurred a host of new applications for the age-old problems of deception. To address the latest deception threat developments and countermeasures in cyberspace, more than 60 experts from funding agencies, government labs, academia and industry attended the International Workshop on Cyber Deception and Defense, Aug. 6 in College Park. The workshop was sponsored by the Army Research Office, with co-funding from the A. James Clark School of Engineering, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research.

The workshop was organized by Dr. Ankur Srivastava (ECE/ISR, University of Maryland); Dr. Dana Dachman-Soled (ECE/UMIACS, University of Maryland); Dr. Cliff Wang (U.S. Army Research Office); and Dr. Edward Colbert (U.S. Army Research Laboratory); with help from student organizer Yuntao Liu (University of Maryland).

Broadly, the workshop covered the following topics:

• Psychological and social-cultural adversarial mental models that can be used to estimate and predict adversarial mental states and decision processes

•. Adversary observation/learning schemes through both active multi-level “honey bait” systems and passive watching, in conjunction with active learning and reasoning to deal with partial information and uncertainties

• Metrics for quantifying deception effectiveness in driving adversary mental state and in determining optimized deception information composition and projection

• Theoretical formulation for a one-shot or multiple rounds of attacker/defender interaction models that can fully capture the rich dynamics of cyber deceptions

• Identification of social/cultural factors in mental state estimation and decision manipulation process

• Artificial intelligence ethics

• Cyber maneuver and adaptive defenses

Talks and speakers

Cyber Deception: The Grand Challenge
Dr. Cliff Wang, U. S. Army Research Office

Deception in Security Games: Theory and Human Behavior
Dr. Milind Tambe, University of Southern California

Integrating Machine Learning with Game Theory for Security
Dr. Fei Fang, Carnegie Mellon University

Detection Games
Dr. Yevgeniy Vorobeychik, Vanderbilt University

Undermining Cognitive Safeguards Against Deception
Dr. George Cybenko, Dartmouth College

Why You Should Care About Older Adults’ Susceptibility to Phishing – Implications for Corporate Security and Democracy
Dr. Daniela Oliveira, University of Florida

Deception and Threat Reduction: Games in Nature
Dr. P. S. Krishnaprasad, University of Maryland

Fake Online Repository Generation Engine
Dr. VS Subrahmanian, Dartmouth College

Autonomous Cyber Agent for Malware Deception
Dr. Ehab Al-Shaer, University of Northern Carolina, Charlotte

Cyber Deception by Design: Toward a Mechanism Design Theory for Dynamic Deception
Dr. Quanyan Zhu, New York University

Published August 15, 2018