data mining, computer security

[Josh Saxe <joshsaxe () yahoo com>]

Hi --

Here's a thought I thought might get an interesting response on this list.

I've been thinking: cyber-security, narrowly constructed is focused on protecting IT resources from being compromised 
or disabled.  Perhaps search and classification problems are also an arena for cybersecurity, goals being obfuscating 
patterns in a dataset, or finding them.

Anyone who wants to avoid classification by a facial recognition algorithm should know how that algorithm works, and 
use that knowledge to evade detection (is there a shape of fake mustache that optimally throws off a given face 
classifier? =).  On the other hand the designers of the facial recognition algorithms need to learn from the 'evaders' 
and respond with more sophisticated algorithms.  This isn't dissimilar from the cat and mouse game played between 
exploit developers and application security whitehats.  And as the size of the world's databases, and the 
'instrumentation' of human activity grows, I wonder if this search / evasion problem won't become more and more 
important.

There are definitely a lot of arenas where this is important.  Credit card fraudsters can strengthen their positions by 
understanding the anomaly detection algorithms used by the credit card companies and modifying their purchasing 
behaviors to elide their detection.  Terrorists building training camps need to understand image analysis algorithms 
that government agencies run on satellite photos.  Of course, spammers have already been playing this game with text 
classification algorithms, 'link-spammers' have played this game with web-graph analysis algorithms, etc, so this isn't 
a new idea, but one that I think is likely to become more important.

Josh


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