Vulnerabilities as monsters: the cultural foundations of computer security (extended abstract)
Wolter Pieters, Luca Consoli · University of Twente Research Information · 2006
Abstract. This paper is part of a project to investigate the philosophical aspects of the scientic discipline of information security. This eld of research investi-gates the means to protect information systems against attacks, typically by mod-elling the system according to a certain security model, and verifying the confor-mance. In this contribution, we study the relation between models of information security, and cultural categories that help us to describe the world. According to Martijntje Smits, cultural categories necessarily produce phenomena that do not t in the categorisation. From a negative perspective, these phenomena can be characterised as monsters: they have properties of two categories that were thought to be mutually exclusive, like many monsters that appear in lms. Smits applies this anthropological approach to explain controversies around the intro-duction of new technologies in our society, such as the current debate on genet-ically manipulated food. We translate this framework to the scientic enterprise of information security, by explicating the analogy between Smits's monsters in society and system vulnerabilities in information security. We argue that several