Making Sense of Cybersecurity in Emerging Technology Areas

Abstract

Shortening technology development cycles in information and communication technology (ICT) make it imperative to anticipate the emergence and evolution of new computing technologies and ecosystems. A wide range of questions must be answered to ensure that new technology environments are viable, including the examination of usability, efficiency, usage models, security, and privacy. These contextual aspects of new technologies are essential for their adoption. They are also important to understanding the potential of new types of cybercrime and requirements for the development of mitigation techniques. However, we lack methodologies to model and predict the features of the evolving ICT ecosystems, and the requirements their evolution places on legal systems and regulatory frameworks. The absence of such models is a significant obstacle to creating consistent approaches necessary to forecast both the technology development and the trends in cybercrime. The chapter discusses which potential methodologies could be used for forecasting cybersecurity concerns in disruptive technology areas and trends in cybercrime in complex environments. It proposes that a unified approach should be developed for predicting cybersecurity effects of innovative technologies and trends in cybercrime. It first examines concepts associated with emerging technologies and their impact on cybersecurity. It then looks at approaches to modelling and analysis already developed in adjacent spaces, with a focus on knowledge representation and risk engineering, and analyses representative examples to illustrate the benefits these approaches can bring.