UBC Math Bio Seminar: Marc Mangel

Many of the words that we use to describe biological disease are often also used to describe cyber systems (e.g. virus, infected). The overall goal of my research in this area is to see how far we can push this metaphor and what we can learn about cyber systems by using models from the population biology of disease. I will begin the talk with preliminary comments about situating work in what Donald Stokes called Pasteur’s Quadrant, the role of theory in biology, and the role of theory in cyber dynamics. I will then turn to the analogy between cyber compromise and disease and lay out the long-term goal of the research program. I will illustrate two canonical problems in models from the population biology of disease that can illuminate aspects of cyber variability and security. One will be investigated in depth and answers the question “how can one prepare for a single cyber attack. I will comment briefly on the implications of stochasticity in the cyber system, other extensions of the canonical problem, and how the work explained today can be extended to persistent cyber operations.