Publications

The Tularosa study: An experimental design and implementation to quantify the effectiveness of cyber deception

Ferguson-Walter, Kimberly J.; Shade, Temmie B.; Rogers, Andrew V.; Niedbala, Elizabeth M.; Trumbo, Michael C.; Nauer, Kevin S.; Divis, Kristin; Jones, Aaron P.; Combs, Angela C.; Abbott, Robert G.

The Tularosa study was designed to understand how defensive deception-including both cyber and psychological-affects cyber attackers. Over 130 red teamers participated in a network penetration task over two days in which we controlled both the presence of and explicit mention of deceptive defensive techniques. To our knowledge, this represents the largest study of its kind ever conducted on a professional red team population. The design was conducted with a battery of questionnaires (e.g., experience, personality, etc.) and cognitive tasks (e.g., fluid intelligence, working memory, etc.), allowing for the characterization of a “typical” red teamer, as well as physiological measures (e.g., galvanic skin response, heart rate, etc.) to be correlated with the cyber events. This paper focuses on the design, implementation, data, population characteristics, and begins to examine preliminary results.