The ubiquity of mobile devices has quickly thinned the walls separating the digital and physical world. Our mobile phones and tablets are practically cognitive prosthesis. The thinning of the wall, however, has opened up holes for new threats. In this talk I’m going to discuss a new field of vulnerability research called Emergent Vulnerabilities. These are vulnerabilities not caused by erroneous functions or flaws, but caused by how we and our devices all interact. They won’t replace the current vulnerabilities we must face, but in the coming years they will become yet another class of vulnerability we must combat as security practitioners. I’ll provide a basis for the understanding of emergent vulnerabilities, ways to go about analyzing them, and potential ideas of how to deal with them in general.
Nathaniel is currently a PhD student at Indiana University studying “Security Informatics”, a fancy name for Information Security. When he’s not working on his dissertation he’s working on implementing new cryptographic techniques like Fully Homomorphic Cryptography and Two-Party Secure Computation. He’s also worked on both the Linux Kernel, the Linux audit project, and the Android Open Source Project. He enjoys hanging out with InfoSec practitioners to maintain his sanity.