Sunny Fugate

The Human Factors of Cyber Network Defense

Technology’s role in the fight against malicious cyber-attacks is critical to the increasingly networked world of today. Yet, technology does not exist in isolation: the human factor is an aspect of cyber-defense operations with increasingly recognized importance. Thus, the human factors community has a unique responsibility to help create and validate cyber defense systems according to basic principles and design philosophy. Concurrently, the collective science must advance. These goals are not mutually exclusive pursuits: therefore, toward both these ends, this research provides cyber-cognitive links between cyber defense challenges and major human factors and ergonomics (HFE) research areas that offer solutions and instructive paths forward. In each area, there exist cyber research opportunities and realms of core HFE science for exploration. We raise the cyber defense domain up to the HFE community at-large as a sprawling area for scientific discovery and contribution.

Wireless communication glove apparatus for motion tracking, gesture recognition, data transmission, and reception in extreme environments

Military personnel need better ways to communicate in hostile, noisy, silence-mandated, and/or extreme environments. Typing on a keyboard is difficult and impractical while wearing comprehensive protective clothing. Wireless data gloves were researched and developed to transmit and receive ASCII code and other signals as hand gestures. Two categories of glove prototypes were constructed: gloves with and without a haptic-IO capability. All data gloves detect motion, such as gestures, using magnetic sensors. Non-haptic gloves only transmit static and dynamic gestures. Haptic gloves have vibro-mechanical devices on the fingertips for feedback about transmitted signals and for covert-signal reception. Many potential communications applications include hazardous and covert military operations, space operations, fire fighting, mining, training, underwater use, and aids for the visually and hearing impaired.

Next-generation tactical-situation-assessment technology (TSAT): chat

This paper presents concepts, content, status, applications and challenges of chat as used in the military context of secure net-centric command and control. It describes the importance of chat as it contributes to situation assessment and the common operating picture, which presents current collective knowledge of the battle space. The paper discusses future chat capabilities and outlines the road ahead for the TSAT project.

“Oh, Look, A Butterfly!” A Framework For Distracting Attackers To Improve Cyber Defense

Inverting human factors can aid in cyber defense by flipping well-known guidelines and using them to de-grade and disrupt the performance of a cyber attacker. There has been significant research on how we perform cyber defense tasks and how we should present information to operators, cyber defenders, and analysts to make them more efficient and more effective. We can actually create these situations just as easily as we can mitigate them. Oppositional human factors are a new way to apply well-known research on human attention allocation to disrupt potential cyber attackers and provide much-needed asymmetric benefits to the defender.

Learning from super-mutants: searching post-apocalyptic software ecosystems for novel semantics-preserving transforms

In light of recent advances in genetic-algorithm-driven automated program modification, our team has been actively exploring the art, engineering, and discovery of novel semantics-preserving transforms. While modern compilers represent some of the best ideas we have for automated program modification, current approaches represent only a small subset of the types of transforms which can be achieved. In the wilderness of post-apocalyptic software ecosystems of genetically-modified and mutant programs, there exist a broad array of potentially useful software mutations, including semantics-preserving transforms that may play an important role in future software design, development, and most importantly, evolution.

Proposing ambient visualization and pre-attentive processing for threat detection

Computer threats have gradually become the Achilles heel of the modern world, tearing tendon from bone in high security enterprise information systems and desktop computers alike. Even the most ardent advocates of computer security acknowledge the failure of our best practices to save us from grave injury.

Microformats for Innovative Lexicons

A microformat is a set of design principles for including semantic information within standard X/HTML markup. Individual microformat entities are distributed yet share a common semantics. Each microformat is a granule of structured information containing a set of attributes. These information granules can be produced, distributed, aggregated, and consumed without reliance on centralized services. We describe the impact on the gathering, distribution, and analysis of concepts within our visual communication research. In this paper we present solutions for managing lexical consistency when microformat-structured information granules are distributed and maintained independently and asynchronously. Lexical groups and hierarchies leverage the resulting inconsistencies, utilizing term aggregation across visual and linguistic features to dynamically compose lexicons and to perform lexical analysis. We think of this as creating semantic and orthographic ’projections’ of the lexicon into different feature spaces. We show how to use this approach to construct situated lexicons which derive from shared context and social communities.