Essential Cybersecurity Science: Build, Test, and Evaluate Secure Systems

If you’re involved in cybersecurity as a software developer, forensic investigator, or network administrator, this practical guide shows you how to apply the scientific method when assessing techniques for protecting your information systems. You’ll learn how to conduct scientific experiments on everyday tools and procedures, whether you’re evaluating corporate security systems, testing your own security product, or looking for bugs in a mobile game.

Once author Josiah Dykstra gets you up to speed on the scientific method, he helps you focus on standalone, domain-specific topics, such as cryptography, malware analysis, and system security engineering. The latter chapters include practical case studies that demonstrate how to use available tools to conduct domain-specific scientific experiments.

• Learn the steps necessary to conduct scientific experiments in cybersecurity
• Explore fuzzing to test how your software handles various inputs
• Measure the performance of the Snort intrusion detection system
• Locate malicious “needles in a haystack” in your network and IT environment
• Evaluate cryptography design and application in IoT products
• Conduct an experiment to identify relationships between similar malware binaries
• Understand system-level security requirements for enterprise networks and web services

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction to Cybersecurity Science
Chapter 2. Conducting Your Own Cybersecurity Experiments
Chapter 3. Cybersecurity Experimentation and Test Environments
Chapter 4. Software Assurance
Chapter 5. Intrusion Detection and Incident Response
Chapter 6. Situational Awareness and Data Analytics
Chapter 7. Cryptography
Chapter 8. Digital Forensics
Chapter 9. Malware Analysis
Chapter 10. System Security Engineering
Chapter 11. Human-Computer Interaction and Usable Security
Chapter 12. Visualization
Appendix A. Understanding Bad Science, Scientific Claims, and Marketing Hype