Predicting and fixing vulnerabilities before they occur
Hong-Mei Chen, Rick Kazman, Ira Monarch, Ping Wang · 2016
The number and variety of cyber-attacks is rapidly increasing, and the rate of new software vulnerabilities is also rising dramatically. The cybersecurity community typically reacts to attacks after they occur. Being reactive is costly and can be fatal, where attacks threaten lives, important data, or mission success. Taking a proactive approach, we are: (I) identifying potential attacks before they come to fruition, and based on this identification; (II) developing preventive counter-measures. We describe a Proactive Cybersecurity System (PCS), a layered, modular service platform that applies big data collection and processing tools a wide variety of unstructured data sources to identify potential attacks and develop countermeasures. The PCS provides security analysts a holistic, proactive, and systematic approach to cybersecurity. Here we describe our research vision and progress towards that vision.