| Emergence is a concept describing whole system phenomenon that cannot be easily explained soley from the behavior of the system's elements. Popular examples include ant colonies, human society, and flocks of birds. Emergence is a concept that surrounds us daily in our physical lives, but with the advent of the Internet of Things and the push towards ubiquitous computing, emergence is now encroaching our digital lives as well. Emergence will manifest itself digitally in both positive and negative ways. In this dissertation, I focus primarily on potential negative manifestations in the form of emergent vulnerabilities and emergent attacks facilitated by the large number of interactions created from ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things. Information security has worked to secure the personal information of our digital lives for the past few decades with attempts to engineer more secure systems. These attempts generally focus on studying and improving individual components of a system at a time. With a rise in emergent vulnerabilities and attacks, information security must adapt and expand its tool set to handle phenomenon that require studying whole systems at a time. In this dissertation I show, with two detailed use cases, how methods can be appropriated from communities such as complex systems, epidemiology, and computational social science, to study emergent vulnerabilities and attacks and propose potential mitigations. I also provide a scaffolding to help researchers frame problems of emergence in information security. |
