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Introduction

This Cybersecurity wiki provides a set of evolving resources on cybersecurity, broadly defined, and includes an Annotated Bibliography on relevant articles and literature, which can be searched in a number of ways. Please see below.

This wiki is intended as a tool/resource for researchers, technologists, students, policy-makers and others who are interested in cybersecurity issues more broadly.

Cybersecurity Overview

The term “Cybersecurity” encompasses a range of issues from Cybercrime to Cyberwar. These in turn embrace a diverse set of activities and interests.

Cybercrime, for example, can refer to a lone hacker breaking into a single computer or to an organized network of computer criminals collecting thousands or millions of credit card numbers and/or personal information records from multiple poorly protected corporate sources. Responses to cybercrime range from offering incentives to individuals, manufacturers and/or corporations to protect against malware and botnet attacks to decisions about insurance and risk management.

Cyberwarfare includes covert espionage attacks against secure systems to collect sensitive national security information, distributed attacks against the civilian infrastructure to cause widespread failures of energy and/or communication systems or targeted attacks against military targets with the intent to render offensive and defensive systems inoperable or to take control of systems with the ability to deliver kinetic attacks. These attacks all create complicated questions of attribution and law, as the normal laws of war are of questionable value when applied to threats delivered domestically from a anonymous source in a distant location. In addition, deterrence, offensive actions and defensive response often become blurred in the cyber realm, requiring a fresh look at what policies such as “no first strike” mean in cyberspace.

Solutions to these problems will involve addressing questions of economics, incentives, law, legislation, politics, government-private cooperation and international diplomacy. Government, industry, the military and the public must all play a role in deciding how much cybersecurity is needed and who will pay for it. These stakeholders must also address the tradeoffs between privacy and security that often arise in addressing cyber threats. Finally, there needs to be a way to measure the threat and the protections put in place so that the players can make intelligent choices in allocating scare resources.

Key Resources

Reader's Guide: "How to Use this Wiki"

Our Annotated Bibliography presents and summarizes all of the resources we've collected by key issues and themes in Cybersecurity.

Because this bibliography encompasses such a wide range of cybersecurity issues, the most direct way to get started is to look through the detailed Table of Contents and select Specific Issues or Themes of interest. For example, "TOC->Issues->Cybercrime" or TOC->Security Targets->Private Critical Infrastructure->Financial Institutions and Networks. At the top of each page within the Table of Contents is a "bread crumb" trail showing the path through the Table of Contents to the current page. Each level in this trail is clickable and allows you to move up one or more levels to broaden your search. For example, if you are looking at the TOC-> Issues-> Economics of Cybersecurity->Incentives page, you can click on the Issues-> link to see references addressing all the cybersecurity Issues topics.

If you are interested in a broad topic area, however, you might choose to start your search from one of the Broad Topics. This allows you to search within the broad categories of Overview, Threats and Actors, Issues, and Approaches.

Alternately, you can access the readings that we've summarized by Resource Type, which includes Government Reports, Industry Reports and Books.

For a more targeted review by Key Word, please review our Keyword Index and Glossary of Core Ideas, which will enable you to search definitions and references related to specific terms, from Air-Gapped Network to Zero-Day Exploit.

An alphabetized List of All Articles in the bibliography is available in the Annotated Bibliography.

References may also be accessed in a standard bibliographic format (BibTeX) here: Bibliography.

Ongoing Work

A Note on Methodology: The materials featured in this wiki are just a starting point for our inquiry. They were selected as foundational documents on the recommendation of select researchers. During the next phase of the project, experts, policy-makers, academics, and others will be asked to review and evaluate the current collection and make recommendations for additional resources to include. We have also included a list of suggested materials for review and possible inclusion in the next phase of the project.

Additional articles for consideration are listed here: Suggested References to Add to Wiki

About the Project

This wiki is part of the Minerva Initiative.

The resources have been assembled by a team at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Contributors include: David Abrams, Jacob Albert, Urs Gasser, Jack Goldsmith, Shane Matthews, Caroline Nolan, and Felix Treguer.

If you have feedback, comments, or suggested additional readings/resources, please contact Caroline Nolan: cnolan@cyber.law.harvard.edu

Templates and Wiki Tools

Template for Sources

Guidelines for adding Bibliography entries

Wiki User's Guide