A Survey on Using Kolmogorov Complexity in Cybersecurity

João S Resende,Luís Antunes,Rolando Martins

doi:10.3390/e21121196

Abstract

Security and privacy concerns are challenging the way users interact with devices. The number of devices connected to a home or enterprise network increases every day. Nowadays, the security of information systems is relevant as user information is constantly being shared and moving in the cloud; however, there are still many problems such as, unsecured web interfaces, weak authentication, insecure networks, lack of encryption, among others, that make services insecure. The software implementations that are currently deployed in companies should have updates and control, as cybersecurity threats increasingly appearing over time. There is already some research towards solutions and methods to predict new attacks or classify variants of previous known attacks, such as (algorithmic) information theory. This survey combines all relevant applications of this topic (also known as Kolmogorov Complexity) in the security and privacy domains. The use of Kolmogorov-based approaches is resource-focused without the need for specific knowledge of the topic under analysis. We have defined a taxonomy with already existing work to classify their different application areas and open up new research questions.

Highlights

Cybersecurity experts develop mechanism to protect users and devices, but there is a constant “arms race” between attackers and defenders
The number of challenges ranges from zero-day detection, software vulnerabilities with known prior attacks or social engineering attacks. These challenges have led to the production of many security and privacy protocols, and there are security specialists in companies where their job is to analyze implementations and enhance security mechanisms to prevent attackers from exploiting potential flaws and/or vulnerabilities
BinAuthor [26] is a type of solution that shows multiple applications of Kolmogorov Complexity: it applies it to simple tasks, and enhances it with external sources of information, such as, in the example of collaborative phishing detection (PhishTank [51])

Summary

Introduction

Cybersecurity experts develop mechanism to protect users and devices, but there is a constant “arms race” between attackers and defenders. The number of challenges ranges from zero-day detection, software vulnerabilities with known prior attacks or social engineering attacks. These challenges have led to the production of many security and privacy protocols, and there are security specialists in companies where their job is to analyze implementations and enhance security mechanisms to prevent attackers from exploiting potential flaws and/or vulnerabilities. To analyze the security of implementations, many companies prefer open source protocols because it allows them to make a more informed choice about the security of a software [1]. Despite of having benefits of using open source software, it does not provide security requirements by itself, because there is a need to have continuous auditing of the code

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Discussion

Conclusion