Call for Papers: WEIS'10

Monday, January 18. 2010
admin
I am happy to serve on the program committee of the 9th Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS). The Call for Papers is now available. WEIS will take place on June 7-8, 2010 at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

Important dates are:
  • Submissions due: February 22, 2010
  • Notification of acceptance: April 2, 2010
  • Workshop: June 7-8, 2010

Information security continues to grow in importance, as threats proliferate, privacy erodes, and attackers find new sources of value. Yet the security of information systems depends on more than just technology. Good security requires an understanding of the incentives and tradeoffs inherent to the behavior of systems and organizations. As society’s dependence on information technology has deepened, policy makers, including the President of the United States, have taken notice. Now more than ever, careful research is needed to accurately characterize threats and countermeasures, in both the public and private sectors.

The Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) is the leading forum for interdisciplinary scholarship on information security, combining expertise from the fields of economics, social science, business, law, policy and computer science. Prior workshops have explored the role of incentives between attackers and defenders, identified market failures dogging Internet security, and assessed investments in cyber-defense. This workshop will build on past efforts using empirical and analytic tools to not only understand threats, but also strengthen security through novel evaluations of available solutions. How should information risk be modeled given the constraints of rare incidence and high interdependence? How do individuals’ and organizations’ perceptions of privacy and security color their decision making? How can we move towards a more secure information infrastructure and code base while accounting for the incentives of stakeholders?

The full Call for Papers is available at http://weis2010.econinfosec.org/cfp.html.

Challenge 1 posted - Signed books as prizes!

Monday, January 18. 2010
The first challenge of the Honeynet Forensic Challenge 2010 has been posted at http://honeynet.org/node/504. The task is to analyze a packet capture that was collected by a honeypot. Analyze and answer the following questions:
  1. Which systems (i.e. IP addresses) are involved? (2pts)
  2. What can you find out about the attacking host (e.g., where is it located)? (2pts)
  3. How many TCP sessions are contained in the dump file? (2pts)
  4. How long did it take to perform the attack? (2pts)
  5. Which operating system was targeted by the attack? And which service? Which vulnerability? (6pts)
  6. Can you sketch an overview of the general actions performed by the attacker? (6pts)
  7. What specific vulnerability was attacked? (2pts)
  8. What actions does the shellcode perform? Pls list the shellcode. (8pts)
  9. Do you think a Honeypot was used to pose as a vulnerable victim? Why? (6pts)
  10. Was there malware involved? Whats the name of the malware? (We are not looking for a detailed malware analysis for this challenge) (2pts)
  11. Do you think this is a manual or an automated attack? Why? (2pts)

Get the pcap at http://honeynet.org/files/attack-trace.pcap_.gz, they were provided together with the questions by Tillmann Werner. Deadline for submissions is Monday, February 1st 2010 at 17:00 EST. There will be some small prizes, among them signed copies of our book "Virtual Honeypots: From Botnet Tracking to Intrusion Detection". Full information is available at http://honeynet.org/node/504.