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Cyber deception : building the scientific foundation
Jajodia S., Subrahmanian V., Swarup V., Wang C., Springer International Publishing, New York, NY, 2016. 314 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319326-97-9)
Date Reviewed: Jul 17 2017

This collection of 12 contributions (314 pages), with no introduction and no index, aims, according to the editors, to establish “a scientific foundation for cyber deception.” It was supported by grants from the US Army Research Office.

Deception is rooted in the verb “to deceive,” which means “to cause to believe something false” or “to give a misleading impression” (according to the Oxford English Dictionary). The book misses out in most chapters at stating what is believed true or false, and what is unique to cyber deception. For strategic goals around political or war-related facts, deception by human means is age-old, but also culturally dependent as very often the piece of information that is attempted to be labeled true/false is not only a fact, but very often also a symbol aimed at being communicated to others. To mirror and compare with progress in cyber deception, it is always useful to revisit real historical deception events such as, for example, those related to ULTRA efforts during World War II [1], or fiction inspired by real deception events around, for example, the Cold War [2]. They will show that cyber deception is only at an early stage in designing cunning processes, craftiness, or trickery, because computer-based means in essence are too simple, although the processing power eases the search for likely processes. There is also the wider issue of clarifying efficiency, as long as true/false are not defined precisely and independently.

Several chapters expose the concepts used to model an adversary (like MITRE’s ATT&CK model), to embed honey-potting into commodity Linux server architectures (RED HERRING), to report about capture-the-flag exercises (such as DEFCON), or to collect data allowing the estimation of probabilities for some tasks (the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), malware characterization, service fingerprinting). Other chapters deal with detection, measurement, and planning techniques, including traffic flow analysis to conceal command nodes. As for deceptive attitudes, almost all want to go undetected; key decision stages lie in the trust/believability of information or a player, and in designing classification rules such that the deception falls into background noise or misclassified cases. Therefore, several papers touch upon Markov chain handling, and a survey is provided on anonymity.

Some chapters hinge on the basic concept of having an attacker and a defender, or at least causing “a causal relationship between the psychological state created by the influence on the adversary and the adversary’s behavior.” This leads to schemes that create uncertainty around either a virtual attack environment, or reallocating computing and networking resources inside virtual network environments. In reality, though, there are no such binary notions of attacker and defender, as all players simultaneously carry out deception and are subject to deception. Even if, as described in one chapter, the exploration of malicious hacker forums gives some clues on capabilities, the winners are still those who have clear objectives and combine different means of deception (not just cyber deception).

The book omits other scientific approaches to deception, especially psychology, and also mathematical multi-player game theory, which offer often deeper strategies to guide the planning, command, and control of cyber deception. The different chapters in the volume sometimes refer to specific computer-based techniques, which is helpful; however, it would have been better if they were defined, indexed, and presented coherently, especially in terms of usage contexts.

This is an interesting volume, and a real challenge to readers, both for those seeking to extract truth out of chaff or lack of information, as well as for those remotely or closely involved in propaganda, public communication, information warfare, and media. All may ultimately agree that the best answers are to be found in different schools of philosophy, starting with Plato (in Meno) to Nietzsche, Kant, or Bachelard.

Reviewer:  Prof. L.-F. Pau, CBS Review #: CR145430 (1709-0608)
1) Lewin, R. Ultra goes to war. Grafton Books, London, UK, 1988.
2) Volkoff, V. Le montage (Trans: The set-up). Julliard , L'Age d'homme, Paris, France, 1982.
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