NURSE: eNd-UseR IoT malware detection tool for Smart homEs

IoT devices keep entering our homes with the promise of delivering more services and enhancing user experience; however, these new devices also carry along an alarming number of vulnerabilities and security issues. In most cases, the users of these devices are completely unaware of the security risks that connecting these devices entail. Current...

PaDAWaNS: Proactive Domain Abuse Warning and Notification System

The counterfeit market is rapidly expanding into the online realm. Large amounts of fraudulent webshops advertise luxury clothing and fashion accessories, but ship counterfeit products to their customers. Apart from customers, brand owners and domain registries experience a negative impact caused by these fake webshops. Current countermeasures...

Building Cybersecurity Awareness: The need for evidence-based framing strategies

Cybersecurity is a global phenomenon representing a complex socio-technical challenge for governments, but requiring the involvement of individuals. Although cybersecurity is one of the most important challenges faced by governments today, the visibility and public awareness remains limited. Almost everybody has heard of cybersecurity,...

Cybersecurity via Intermediaries: Analyzing Security Measurements to Understand Intermediary Incentives and Inform Public Policy

Research in the field of information security economics has clarified how attacker and defender incentives affect cybersecurity. It has also highlighted the role of intermediaries in strengthening cybersecurity. Intermediaries are organizations and firms that provide the Internet’s infrastructure and platforms. This dissertation looks at how...

Secrecy versus openness: Internet security and the limits of open source and peer production

Open source and peer production have been praised as organisational models that could change the world for the better. It is commonly asserted that almost any societal activity could benefit from distributed, bottom-up collaboration — by making societal interaction more open, more social, and more democratic. However, we also need to be mindful...

Security economics in the HTTPS value chain

Even though we increasingly rely on HTTPS to secure Internet communications, several landmark incidents in recent years have illustrated that its security is deeply flawed. We present an extensive multi-disciplinary analysis that examines how the systemic vulnerabilities of the HTTPS authentication model could be addressed. We conceptualize the...