Main Page

Start at the Table of Contents

To get started immediately, visit the Table of Contents and click on a topic of interest.

Introduction

This Cybersecurity wiki provides a set of evolving resources on cybersecurity, broadly defined, and includes an annotated list of 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 - How to Use this Wiki

Navigating Through the Table of Contents

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, Cybercrime or Financial Institutions and Networks. At the top of each topic page within the Table of Contents is a "bread crumb" trail showing the path through the Table of Contents to that page. This trail not only shows you how the current page topic fits into the overall structure of the bibliography, each level in this trail is individually selectable allowing 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.

At the bottom of each topic page is a list of subcategories leading deeper into the Table of Contents from the current topic. This allows you to drill down to pages with greater specificity. For example, if the current page is TOC-> Issues-> Economics of Cybersecurity-> (shown in the bread crumb trail at the top of the page), the bottom of the page will offer links to the five subcategories of the Economics of Cybersecurity including:

Choose a Broad Topic Area to Explore

If you are interested in beginning with 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, Resource by Type, Threats and Actors, Issues, and Approaches.

Select an Overview Document

Alternately, you can access one of the Overview readings or one of the selected readings that we've summarized by Resource Type, which includes Government Reports and Documents, Independent Reports, Industry Reports and Books.

Access the Keyword Index

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.

See a List of All Articles

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

Export References in Standard BibTex Format

References may also be accessed and exported 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