This book discusses uncertain threats, which are caused by unknown attacks based on unknown vulnerabilities or backdoors in the information system or control devices and software/hardware. Generalized robustness control architecture and the mimic defense mechanisms are presented in this book, which could change “the easy-to-attack and difficult-to-defend game” in cyberspace. The endogenous uncertain effects from the targets of the software/hardware based on this architecture can produce magic “mimic defense fog”, and suppress in a normalized mode random disturbances caused by physical or logic elements, as well as effects of non-probability disturbances brought by uncertain security threats. Although progress has been made in the current security defense theories in cyberspace and various types of security technologies have come into being, the effectiveness of such theories and technologies often depends on the scale of the prior knowledge of the attackers, on the part of the defender and on the acquired real-timing and accuracy regarding the attackers’ behavior features and other information. Hence, there lacks an efficient active defense means to deal with uncertain security threats from the unknown. Even if the bottom-line defense technologies such as encrypted verification are adopted, the security of hardware/software products cannot be quantitatively designed, verified or measured. Due to the “loose coupling” relationship and border defense modes between the defender and the protected target, there exist insurmountable theoretical and technological challenges in the protection of the defender and the target against the utilization of internal vulnerabilities or backdoors, as well as in dealing with attack scenarios based on backdoor-activated collaboration from both inside and outside, no matter how augmented or accumulated protective measures are adopted. Therefore, it is urgent to jump out of the stereotyped thinking based on conventional defense theories and technologies, find new theories and methods to effectively reduce the utilization of vulnerabilities and backdoors of the targets without relying on the priori knowledge and feature information, and to develop new technological means to offset uncertain threats based on unknown vulnerabilities and backdoors from an innovative perspective. This book provides a solution both in theory and engineering implementation to the difficult problem of how to avoid the uncontrollability of product security caused by globalized marketing, COTS and non-trustworthy software/hardware sources. It has been proved that this revolutionary enabling technology has endowed software/hardware products in IT/ICT/CPS with endogenous security functions and has overturned the attack theories and methods based on hardware/software design defects or resident malicious codes. This book is designed for educators, theoretical and technological researchers in cyber security and autonomous control and for business technicians who are engaged in the research on developing a new generation of software/hardware products by using endogenous security enabling technologies and for other product users. Postgraduates in IT/ICT/CPS/ICS will discover that (as long as the law of “structure determines the nature and architecture determines the security is properly used), the problem of software/hardware design defects or malicious code embedding will become the swelling of Achilles in the process of informationization and will no longer haunt Pandora’s box in cyberspace. Security and opening-up, advanced progressiveness and controllability seem to be contradictory, but there can be theoretically and technologically unified solutions to the problem.

This two volume set (CCIS 1451 and 1452) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference of Pioneering Computer Scientists, Engineers and Educators, ICPCSEE 2021 held in Taiyuan, China, in September 2021. The 81 papers presented in these two volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 256 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on big data management and applications; social media and recommendation systems; infrastructure for data science; basic theory and techniques for data science; machine learning for data science; multimedia data management and analysis; ​social media and recommendation systems; data security and privacy; applications of data science; education research, methods and materials for data science and engineering; research demo.

Impending technological advances will widen an adversary’s attack plane over the next decade. Visualizing what the future will hold, and what new threat vectors could emerge, is a task that traditional planning mechanisms struggle to accomplish given the wide range of potential issues. Understanding and preparing for the future operating environment is the basis of an analytical method known as Threatcasting. It is a method that gives researchers a structured way to envision and plan for risks ten years in the future. Threatcasting uses input from social science, technical research, cultural history, economics, trends, expert interviews, and even a little science fiction to recognize future threats and design potential futures. During this human-centric process, participants brainstorm what actions can be taken to identify, track, disrupt, mitigate, and recover from the possible threats. Specifically, groups explore how to transform the future they desire into reality while avoiding an undesired future. The Threatcasting method also exposes what events could happen that indicate the progression toward an increasingly possible threat landscape. This book begins with an overview of the Threatcasting method with examples and case studies to enhance the academic foundation. Along with end-of-chapter exercises to enhance the reader’s understanding of the concepts, there is also a full project where the reader can conduct a mock Threatcasting on the topic of “the next biological public health crisis.” The second half of the book is designed as a practitioner’s handbook. It has three separate chapters (based on the general size of the Threatcasting group) that walk the reader through how to apply the knowledge from Part I to conduct an actual Threatcasting activity. This book will be useful for a wide audience (from student to practitioner) and will hopefully promote new dialogues across communities and novel developments in the area.

It's saturday night in Santa Barbara and school is done for the year. Everyone is headed to the same party. Or at least it seems that way. The place is packed. The beer is flowing. Simple, right? But for 11 different people the motives are way more complicated. As each character takes a turn and tells his or her story, the eleven individuals intersect, and reconnect, collide, and combine in ways that none of them ever saw coming.

Written by leading scholars, the fourteen case studies in this volume will help policymakers, scholars, and students make sense of contemporary cyber conflict through historical analogies to past military-technological problems.

Mapping Cyberspace is a ground-breaking geographic exploration and critical reading of cyberspace, and information and communication technologies. The book: * provides an understanding of what cyberspace looks like and the social interactions that occur there * explores the impacts of cyberspace, and information and communication technologies, on cultural, political and economic relations * charts the spatial forms of virutal spaces * details empirical research and examines a wide variety of maps and spatialisations of cyberspace and the information society * has a related website at http://www.MappingCyberspace.com. This book will be a valuable addition to the growing body of literature on cyberspace and what it means for the future.