Emergent Vulnerabilities: What ant colonies, schools of fish, and security have in common.

Emergent Vulnerabilities: What ant colonies, schools of fish, and security have in common.

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.

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