CyBOK — The Cybersecurity Body of Knowledge

The purpose of the Distributed Systems Security chapter covers a broad range of topics from trusted computing to Trojan circuits. To classify these topics we follow the different hardware abstraction layers as introduced by the Y-chart of Gajski & Kuhn.

We speak with CyBOK Hardware Security author Ingrid Verbauwhede for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Adversarial Behaviours chapter is to provide an overview of the malicious operations that are happening on the Internet today. The chapter discusses how these frameworks can be used by researchers and practitioners to develop effective mitigations against malicious online operations.

We speak with CyBOK Distributed Systems Security author Gianluca Stringhini for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Law and Regulation chapter is to provide a snapshot of legal and regulatory topics that merit consideration when conducting various activities in the field of cyber security such as: security management, risk assessment, security testing, forensic investigation, research, product and service development, and cyber operations (defensive and offensive). The hope is to provide a framework that shows the cyber security practitioner the most common categories of legal and regulatory risk that apply to these activities, and to highlight (where possible) some sources of legal authority and scholarship..

We speak with CyBOK Law and Regulation author Robert Carolina for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Distributed Systems Security chapter is to introduce the different classes of distributed systems categorising them into two broad categories of decentralised distributed systems (without central coordination) and the coordinated resource/services type of distributed systems. Subsequently, each of these distributed system categories is expounded for the conceptual mechanisms providing their characteristic functionalities prior to discussing the security issues pertinent to these systems.

We speak with CyBOK Distributed Systems Security author Neeraj Suri for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Privacy and Online Rights chapter is to introduce system designers to the concepts and technologies that are used to engineer systems that inherently protect users’ privacy. We aim to provide designers with the ability to identify privacy problems, to describe them from a technical perspective, and to select adequate technologies to eliminate, or at least, mitigate these problems.

We speak with CyBOK Privacy and Online Rights Knowledge Area author Carmela Troncoso for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Network Security chapter is to explain the challenges associated with securing a network under a variety of attacks for a number of networking technologies and widely used security protocols, along with emerging security challenges and solutions. This chapter aims to provide the necessary background in order to understand other knowledge areas. An understanding of basic networking protocol stack and TCP/IP suite is assumed.

We speak with CyBOK Network Security Knowledge Area author Sanjay Jha for an introductory overview of the topic.

The purpose of the Operating Systems & Virtualisation Security chapter is to introduce the principles, primitives and practices for ensuring security at the operating system and hypervisor levels. We see that the challenges related to operating system security have evolved over the past few decades, even if the principles have stayed mostly the same.

We speak with CyBOK Operating Systems & Virtualisation Security author Herbert Bos for an introductory overview of the topic.

The Human Factors chapter presents a foundational understanding of the role of human factors in cyber security. One key aspect of this is how to design security that is usable and acceptable to a range of human actors, for instance, end-users, administrators and developers. This knowledge area also introduces a broader organisational and societal perspective on security that has emerged over the past decade.

We speak with CyBOK Human Factors co-author Awais Rashid for an introductory overview of the topic.

The Authentication, Authorisation & Accountability (AAA) chapter presents the general foundations of access control and some significant instantiations that have emerged as IT kept spreading into new application areas. It will survey modes of user authentication and the way they are currently deployed, authentication protocols for the web, noting how new use cases have led to a shift from authentication to authorisation protocols, and the formalisation of authentication properties as used in today’s protocol analysis tools. On accountability, the focus is on the management and protection of audit logs.

We speak with CyBOK Authentication, Authorisation & Accountability (AAA) author Dieter Gollmann for an introductory overview of the topic.

The Risk Management and Governance chapter explains the fundamental principles of cyber risk assessment and management and their role in risk governance, expanding on these to cover the knowledge required to gain a working understanding of the topic and its sub-areas.

We speak with CyBOK Risk Management and Governance author Pete Burnap for an introductory overview of the topic.