On the imbalance of the security problem space and its expected consequences
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose This paper aims to report on the results of an analysis of the computer security problem space, to suggest the areas with highest potential for making progress in the attacker‐defender game, and to propose questions for future research. Design/methodology/approach The decomposition of the attacker‐defender game into technological, human, and social factors enables one to analyze the concentration of public research efforts by defenders. First, representative activities are selected, then each activity is mapped into the technological, human and social (THS) basis. Afterwards, citation databases are used to estimate the relative volume of publications on each selected activity in the science and engineering communities. Finally, drawing on a number of relevant theories in organizational theory, sociology, and political science, avenues for exploring the social dimension by the defenders are discussed. Findings The analysis suggests that over 94 percent of the public research in computer security has been concentrated on technological advances. Yet attackers seem to employ more and more human and social factors in their attacks. The social organization of the attackers allows them to achieve the results not possible otherwise, shifting the balance in their favour. It is suggested that the scope of research should be broadened, to involve organizational behavior and structure as well as social capital aspects that are currently not high on computer security research agenda. Research limitations/implications The queries limit the search to public content written in the English language only. Since the authors are concerned with the relative (rather than absolute) volume of each activity, it is an open question whether this limitation biases the results. Practical implications As the arms race in computer security progresses, social factors may become or already are increasingly important. The side that capitalizes on them sooner may gain the competitive advantage. Originality/value A simple method for gauging the focus of research efforts in the computer security community and for considering computer security problem space through the lens of social sciences is developed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it