The notion of emergent properties is becoming common place in the physical and social sciences, with applications in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, economics, and sociology. Unfortunately, little attention has been given to the discussion of emergence in the realm of computer security, from either the attack or defense perspectives, despite there being examples of such attacks and defenses. We review the concept of emergence, discuss it in the context of computer security, argue that understanding such concepts is essential for securing our current and future systems, give examples of current attacks and defenses that make use of such concepts, and discuss the tools currently available to understand this field. We conclude by arguing that more focus needs to be given to the emergent perspective in information security, especially as we move forward to the Internet of Things and a world full of cyber-physical systems, as we believe many future attacks will make use of such ideas and defenses will require such insights.

Recent work demonstrates the feasibility and practical use of secure two-party computation [5, 9, 15, 23]. In this work, we present the first Graphical Processing Unit (GPU)-optimized implementation of an optimized Yao's garbled-circuit protocol for two-party secure computation in the honest-but-curious and 1-bit-leaked malicious models. We implement nearly all of the modern protocol advancements, such as Free-XOR, Pipelining, and OT extension. Our implementation is the first allowing entire circuits to be generated concurrently, and makes use of a modification of the XOR technique so that circuit generation is optimized for implementation on SIMD architectures of GPUs. In our best cases we generate about 75 million gates per second and we exceed the state of the art performance metrics on modern CPU systems by a factor of about 200, and GPU systems by about a factor of 2.3. While many recent works on garbled circuits exploit the embarrassingly parallel nature of many tasks that are part of a secure computation protocol, we show that there are still various forms and levels of parallelization that may yet improve the performance of these protocols. In particular, we highlight that implementations on the SIMD architecture of modern GPUs require significantly different approaches than the general purpose MIMD architecture of multi-core CPUs, which again differ from the needs of parallelizing on compute clusters. Additionally, modifications to the security models for many common protocols have large effects on reasonable parallel architectures for implementation.

Digital wireless radios broadcast identification numbers that uniquely identify them. As has been previously observed, given the ubiquity with which people carry smartphones with their embedded WiFi radios powered on, comes the ability to track individuals' movements. The ability to use wireless radios for positioning has been previously observed and developed in to useful products. In these systems a user willingly geolocates themselves by providing identifiers to infrastructure hardware. In this paper we consider the converse question: what rates of monitoring by smartphones devices in a given metropolitan area are necessary to achieve different levels of involuntary geolocation. While previous work has looked at countermeasure that attempt to maintain privacy, no work has attempted to quantify the problem and risks. Using appropriate simulations we give the first quantitative support for the number and conditions of tracking devices necessary to track the locations of non-participant individuals in urban environments. We provide evidence that a small, but not insignificant, number of mobile devices can be used to track a majority of users during a significant fraction of their travel with current devices. We conclude that in the immediate future, malnets would require relatively high infection rates to pose a significant threat, but that voluntary networks, with perceived benefit can probably achieve the usage rates necessary to track individual movements of non-subscribed users to a high-degree of accuracy. Our results also suggest ubiquitous deployment of 802.11n in smartphones would make geolocation feasible by malnets