Network security has become an area of significant importance more than ever as highlighted by the eye-opening numbers data breaches, attacks on critical infrastructure, and malware/ransomware/cryptojacker that are reported almost every day. Increasingly, we relying networked infrastructure with advent IoT, billions devices will be connected to Internet, providing attackers opportunities exploi...

To enable the growth of wireless networks in high assurance computer systems, it is essential to establish a security engineering methodology that provides system security managers with a procedural engineering process to develop computer security policies. Our research demonstrates how wireless communication technology is deployed using the Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS) archit...

Dawn Song is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. She obtained her PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Her research interest lies in security and privacy issues in computer systems and networks. She is the author of more than 35 research papers in areas ranging from software security, networking security, database security, distributed systems security, to applied cryptog...

HackIts are short computer security challenges which are often Web-based. Their purpose is to raise awareness for common security issues by showing different intrusion possibilities in today’s computer security. We present a framework that allows security education in a safe, modular, and motivating way, with the possibility of flexible and low-cost integration into existing curricula. By solvi...

Security indicators in web browsers alert users to the presence of a secure connection between their computer and a web server; many studies have shown that such indicators are largely ignored by users in general. In other areas of computer security, research has shown that technical expertise can decrease user susceptibility to attacks. In this work, we examine whether computer or security exp...

It is becoming increasingly important that employees are taken through a more rigorous security-awareness training programme, in order to protect their personal computer and the networks behind it and to ‘protect them from themselves’. Virus and spam writers have begun to try to fool employees with ‘social engineering’ techniques, which prey on an employee’s willingness to believe in an email s...

In this dissertation, we examine the machine learning issues raised by the domain of anomaly detection for computer security. The anomaly detection task is to recognize the presence of an unusual and potentially hazardous state within the activities of a computer user, system, or network. “Unusual” is defined with respect to some model of “normal” behavior which may be either hard-coded or lear...

Current security systems are designed to prevent foreseeable attacks. Those security systems do not prevent effectively the more emergent types of attacks, like a botnet, whose presence and behavior is difficult to predict. In order to predominate those types of attacks, we advocate an adaptive security approach based on the animal immune system. But since those sophisticated attacks can also b...

The notion of Computer Policy is fundamental to the study of computer security models, the analysis of computer vulnerabilities, the development of intrusion detection tools, and the development of misuse detection tools. Security only makes sense in relation to security policies that specify what is being protected, how it must be protected, who has access to what is being protected, etc. Poli...