Abstract:

And the Lord said: "[L]et us go down, and there confound their language,
that they may not understand one another's speech." These days, technology
and the division of labor confound us. The psychiatrists and heart surgeons
speak different languages. Firewalls and database protection software speak
different languages. The latter example is of particular interest to us. It
makes good sense to integrate automated security experts of various kinds
--- anti-malware, data-leakage prevention, database protection, firewalls,
etc. But how? One idea is a super-expert. There are two problems with that
idea. First there is a large overhead. Second nobody knows how to create the
desired super-expert. Is there an alternative solution? Yes: Enterprise
Security Assessment Sharing system (ESAS) conceived and being built at
Microsoft. The idea is simple. Even if experts speak different languages,
the intersection of their languages is not quite empty. Psychiatrists and
heart surgeons know that a person can be male or female, sick or healthy.
Similarly there is a modest language shared by security experts. We sketch
how and why ESAS works.

Bio

Yuri Gurevich is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft and Prof. Emeritus at
the University of Michigan. He is also an ACM Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a
member of Academia Europaea, and Dr. Honoris Causa of Hasselt University in
Belgium and of Ural State University in Russia.