Cyber Teaming and Role Specialization in a Cyber Security Defense Competition

The Need for Cybersecurity in Industrial Revolution and Smart Cities

Cities have grown in development and sophistication throughout human history. Smart cities are the current incarnation of this process, with increased complexity and social importance. This complexity has come to involve significant digital components and has thus come to raise the associated cybersecurity concerns. Major security relevant events can cascade into the connected systems making up a smart city, causing significant disruption of function and economic damage. The present paper aims to survey the landscape of scientific publication related to cybersecurity-related issues in relation to smart cities. Relevant papers were selected based on the number of citations and the quality of the publishing journal as a proxy indicator for scientific relevance. Cybersecurity will be shown to be reflected in the selected literature as an extremely relevant concern in the operation of smart cities. Generally, cybersecurity is implemented in actual cities through the concerted application of both mature existing technologies and emerging new approaches.

Participation shifts explain degree distributions in a human communications network

Human interpersonal communications drive political, technological, and economic systems, placing importance on network link prediction as a fundamental problem of the sciences. These systems are often described at the network-level by degree counts —the number of communication links associated with individuals in the network—that often follow approximate Pareto distributions, a divergence from Poisson-distributed counts associated with random chance. A defining challenge is to understand the inter-personal dynamics that give rise to such heavy-tailed degree distributions at the network-level; primarily, these distributions are explained by preferential attachment, which, under certain conditions, can create power law distributions; preferential attachment’s prediction of these distributions breaks down, however, in conditions with no network growth. Analysis of an organization’s email network suggests that these degree distributions may be caused by the existence of individual participation-shift dynamics that are necessary for coherent communication between humans. We find that the email network’s degree distribution is best explained by turn-taking and turn-continuing norms present in most social network communication. We thus describe a mechanism to explain a long-tailed degree distribution in conditions with no network growth.

Self-Regulation and Cognitive Agility in Cyber Operations

Reliance upon data networks to conduct military operations presents new challenges to the competence profiles of military personnel. Specifically the increased demand for the new category of military cyber personnel is a direct consequence of the utility of the cyber domain in contemporary military operations, both to support leadership processes and as a domain of operations on its own. The conflation of the cyber and physical domains empowers cyber operators to influence events beyond their immediate physical environment. Proper education and training of such personnel requires new insight into the competencies that are beyond cyber specific technical skills, to govern the complexity of operating in a cyber-physical hybrid environment. This pilot research contributes to the debate on military cyber personnel competencies by investigating how cyber defense operator’s level of self-regulation can contribute to their performance in operations. We hypothesize that higher levels of self-regulation predicts higher levels of cognitive agility as measured by cognitive movement in The Hybrid Space conceptual framework. Displays of cognitive agility within The Hybrid Space have previously been linked to performance in defensive cyber operations. A positive association was therefore expected between levels of self-regulation and displays of cognitive agility. N = 23 cyber cadets from the Norwegian Defence Cyber Academy (NDCA) completed self-regulation questionnaires (SRQs) and self-reported their cognitive location in The Hybrid Space during a 4-day cyber defense exercise. Data showed that higher levels of self-regulation were associated with displays of cognitive agility. According to the regression models in use, self-regulation could explain 43.1% of the total cognitive movements in The Hybrid Space. Understanding factors that contribute to cyber operator performance are needed to improve education and training programs for military cyber personnel. Validating self-regulation as a contributing factor to cognitive agility is important as this can be a pathway to empirically underpin individual cyber operator performance.

Human Factors in the Cybersecurity of Autonomous Vehicles: Trends in Current Research

The cybersecurity of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is an important emerging area of research in traffic safety. Because human failure is the most common reason for a successful cyberattack, human-factor researchers and psychologists might improve AV cybersecurity by researching how to decrease the probability of a successful attack. We review some areas of research connected to the human factor in cybersecurity and find many potential issues. Psychologists might research the characteristics of people prone to cybersecurity failure, the types of scenarios they fail in and the factors that influence this failure or over-trust of AV. Human behavior during a cyberattack might be researched, as well as how to educate people about cybersecurity. Multitasking has an effect on the ability to defend against a cyberattack and research is needed to set the appropriate policy. Human-resource researchers might investigate the skills required for personnel working in AV cybersecurity and how to detect potential defectors early. The psychological profile of cyber attackers should be investigated to be able to set policies to decrease their motivation. Finally, the decrease of driver's driving skills as a result of using AV and its connection to cybersecurity skills is also worth of research.