Depicting human vulnerabilities towards cyber threats via trust analytics

Project Title:

Supervisor(s):

Alireza Jolfaei, Iqbal Gondal, Joarder Kamruzzaman

Contact person and email address:

Alireza Jolfaei a.jolfaei@federation.edu.au

A brief description of the project:

Although most efforts in cyber security focus on purely technical solutions, a significant proportion of attacks and confidential data spills can be attributed, at least in part, to human errors and negligence. Understanding vulnerabilities via human behaviour will be a critical step towards developing mitigation strategies for these vulnerabilities, and hence improving the cyber security posture of stakeholders of significance to national security. This project aims to investigate what individual differences and what patterns of user behaviour can predict people’s vulnerability, directly and indirectly, to cyber threats. Specifically, it will focus on a more robust and accurate measurement of trust in different cyber context, based on generic trust profiles, observable human behaviour, captured physiological signals, and means of interaction. This research will link several key factors including human, trust and cyber security together into a framework. Such a framework is critical for the understanding of human trusting behaviours, deployment of trust methods in cyber scenarios and applications, and further provide effective knowledge regarding how to calibrate human trust, identify human vulnerabilities and avoid human errors in the cyber environment.