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Trailblazing the Artificial Intelligence for Cybersecurity Discipline: A Multi-Disciplinary Research Roadmap

Authors: Sagar Samtani, Murat Kantarcioglu, Hsinchun ChenAuthors Info & Claims
Article No.: 17, Pages 1 - 19
Published: 02 December 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Cybersecurity has rapidly emerged as a grand societal challenge of the 21st century. Innovative solutions to proactively tackle emerging cybersecurity challenges are essential to ensuring a safe and secure society. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly emerged as a viable approach for sifting through terabytes of heterogeneous cybersecurity data to execute fundamental cybersecurity tasks, such as asset prioritization, control allocation, vulnerability management, and threat detection, with unprecedented efficiency and effectiveness. Despite its initial promise, AI and cybersecurity have been traditionally siloed disciplines that relied on disparate knowledge and methodologies. Consequently, the AI for Cybersecurity discipline is in its nascency. In this article, we aim to provide an important step to progress the AI for Cybersecurity discipline. We first provide an overview of prevailing cybersecurity data, summarize extant AI for Cybersecurity application areas, and identify key limitations in the prevailing landscape. Based on these key issues, we offer a multi-disciplinary AI for Cybersecurity roadmap that centers on major themes such as cybersecurity applications and data, advanced AI methodologies for cybersecurity, and AI-enabled decision making. To help scholars and practitioners make significant headway in tackling these grand AI for Cybersecurity issues, we summarize promising funding mechanisms from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that can support long-term, systematic research programs. We conclude this article with an introduction of the articles included in this special issue.

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Published In

ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems  Volume 11, Issue 4
Special Issue on Analytics for Cybersecurity and Privacy, Part 1
December 2020
244 pages
ISSN:2158-656X
EISSN:2158-6578
DOI:10.1145/3426166
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 02 December 2020
Accepted: 01 November 2020
Revised: 01 November 2020
Received: 01 October 2020
Published in TMIS Volume 11, Issue 4

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Author Tags

  1. Cybersecurity
  2. adversarial machine learning
  3. analytics
  4. artificial intelligence
  5. cyber threat intelligence
  6. disinformation
  7. security operations centers

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  • Introduction
  • Research
  • Refereed

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  • National Science Foundation

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  • (2024)Applied Machine Learning for Information SecurityDigital Threats: Research and Practice10.1145/36520295:1(1-5)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2024
  • (2024)The 4th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence-enabled Cybersecurity AnalyticsProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3637528.3671494(6741-6742)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2024
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