Anonymity vs. Trust in Cyber-Security Collaboration
Stuart Murdoch, Nick Leaver · 2015
With the growing threat from overseas and domestic cyber attacks inter-organization cyber-security information sharing is an essential contributor to helping governments and industry to protect and defend their critical network infrastructure from attack. Encouraging collaboration directly impacts the defensive capabilities of all organizations involved in any cyber-information sharing community. A barrier to successful collaboration is the conflicting needs of collaborators to be able to both protect the source of their information for sensitivity, legal, or public relations reasons, but also to validate and trust the information shared with them. This paper uses as an example the UK government's Cyber-Security Information Sharing Partnership (CiSP), an online collaboration environment created by Surevine for sharing and collaborating on cyber-security information across UK industry and government. We discuss the organization and operating principles of the collaboration environment, how the community is structured, and the barriers to participation caused by the conflict between the need for anonymity versus the need to trust the information shared.