Classic 2023

Analytics are pervasive in our lives, ranging from healthcare, transportation, finance, energy, agriculture, weather, science, and government.

Analytics and systems they run on can be decades old and extraordinarily slow to change (e.g. IRS, FAA traffic control).  On the other hand, they often require low-latency computing on ephemeral, real-time data, running on cutting edge hardware that rapidly changes due to the constant race for competitive advantage.  These two extremes make it very difficult to insure the correctness, resilience, and security of the analytic.  Security is too often an underappreciated afterthought or cost to be avoided in the full system design and operation of the analytic. The high consequence impact of ‘getting things wrong’ can be life-changing.

Hardware, software, processes, supply chain, resilience at all levels, and the enormous interdependent complexities of systems all impact system vulnerability.  This complexity greatly increases the attack surface and consequently, we are in a highly asymmetric arms race between defenders and attackers (primarily well-funded state actors and criminal enterprises) in favor of the attackers.

In CLSAC 2023, we explore how to ‘get things right’ when it comes to the role of security in the analytics world.  In ‘Of the Analytic’ we explore how security is addressed by the analytic itself – its architecture, design, tools, and methodologies.  In ‘Security by the Analytic’ we look at analytics in the role of providing security.  Lastly, in ‘For the analytic’ we review environments/tools that form the ecosystem that provides security to analytics.