USENIX supports diversity, equity, and inclusion and condemns hate and discrimination.
For Good Measure: Five Years of Listening to Security Operations
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.
As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.
Mukul Pareek, a colleague at a market maker bank, and I have run the Index of Cyber Security for five years. This article is a kind of compendium of what the Index has shown over those five years, but before I get to that I will discuss how we got to where we are.
The only purpose that makes security metrics worthy of pursuit is that of decision support, where the question being studied is more one of trajectory than exactly measured position. None of the indices I’ll discuss are attempts at science, although those that are in science (or philosophy) will also want measurement of some sort to backstop their theorizing. We are in this because the scale of the task compared to the scale of our tools demands force multiplication—no game play improves without a way to keep score.
Download Article:
Article Section:
COLUMNS
;login: issue: