Cybersecurity advocates motivate individuals and organizations to adopt positive security behaviors. Based on our research, we describe qualities of successful advocates. Our findings have practical implications for expanding the cybersecurity workforce by recruiting and developing professionals who can be effective in advocate or other people-oriented security roles.

Dartmouth College's Institute for Security, Technology, and Society conducted three workshops on securing information technology in healthcare, attended by a diverse range of experts in the field. This article summarizes the three workshops.

Experience-based access management incorporates models, techniques, and tools to reconcile differences between the ideal access model and the enforced access control.

Modern network security rests on the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols. Distributed systems, mobile and desktop applications, embedded devices, and all of secure Web rely on SSL/TLS for protection against network attacks. This protection critically depends on whether SSL/TLS clients correctly validate X.509 certificates presented by servers during the SSL/TLS handshake protocol. We design, implement, and apply the first methodology for large-scale testing of certificate validation logic in SSL/TLS implementations. Our first ingredient is "frankencerts," synthetic certificates that are randomly mutated from parts of real certificates and thus include unusual combinations of extensions and constraints. Our second ingredient is differential testing: if one SSL/TLS implementation accepts a certificate while another rejects the same certificate, we use the discrepancy as an oracle for finding flaws in individual implementations. Differential testing with frankencerts uncovered 208 discrepancies between popular SSL/TLS implementations such as OpenSSL, NSS, CyaSSL, GnuTLS, PolarSSL, MatrixSSL, etc. Many of them are caused by serious security vulnerabilities. For example, any server with a valid X.509 version 1 certificate can act as a rogue certificate authority and issue fake certificates for any domain, enabling man-in-the-middle attacks against MatrixSSL and GnuTLS. Several implementations also accept certificate authorities created by unauthorized issuers, as well as certificates not intended for server authentication. We also found serious vulnerabilities in how users are warned about certificate validation errors. When presented with an expired, self-signed certificate, NSS, Safari, and Chrome (on Linux) report that the certificate has expired-a low-risk, often ignored error-but not that the connection is insecure against a man-in-the-middle attack. These results demonstrate that automated adversarial testing with frankencerts is a powerful methodology for discovering security flaws in SSL/TLS implementations.

Surveys of US Defense and Commerce department employees show that using Personal Identity Verification and Common Access Cards for two-factor authentication results in improved usability and security.

The Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) community publishes an aggregate metric to calculate the 'Most Dangerous Software Errors.' However, the used equation highly biases frequency over exploitability and impact. We provide a metric to mitigate this bias and discuss the most significant software weaknesses over the last ten years.