Workshop on 11/20/2025: Measuring Cybersecurity Through End-User Harm
Has the state of cybersecurity improved, declined, or stayed the same? To answer, we need a reliable way to measure “the state of cybersecurity” and assess how it has changed over time. Some current measures include counts of vulnerability (e.g., CVE) reports and/or exploitations (as done by MITRE and Google Project Zero), counts of data breaches (as done by Verizon), and operational costs and revenue losses to companies due to cyber incidents (as estimated by affected companies). In this talk, I propose another measure: harms experienced by end users. End-user harms relate to business-centered measures like those above, but provide essential context about their severity. As an analogy, the Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys both employers and employees because these sources may tell different stories; business and end-user reports about cybersecurity harms may do likewise. A key challenge is how to collect the data. Surveys, device monitors (such as part of security software deployments), and local population studies may be options.
Michael Hicks is the Cecilia Fitler Moore Professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Director of its Schlein Center for Cybersecurity. From 2022-2025 he was a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services, where he co-led scientific development of the Cedar authorization policy language. From 2002-2022 he was a Professor at the University of Maryland. He was the first Director of the University of Maryland’s Cybersecurity Center (MC2). His research has focused on ways to improve software’s security, availability, and reliability, often by leveraging programming language-based techniques. He has also carried out several projects studying the empirical foundations of software security practices. Learn more about his work at https://mhicks.me.
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