Research Communities in cyber security: A Comprehensive Literature Review

TL;DR

This paper maps the landscape of cybersecurity research by analyzing a large citation network to identify major research communities and sub-communities, revealing research focus areas and gaps.

Contribution

It applies community detection to a comprehensive citation graph to systematically identify and describe cybersecurity research communities and their subfields.

Findings

Identified 12 top-level cybersecurity research communities.

Discovered 80 sub-communities within the main fields.

Highlighted research emphasis on cryptography, biometrics, and information hiding.

Abstract

In order to provide a coherent overview of cyber security research, the Scopus academic abstract and citation database was mined to create a citation graph of 98,373 authors active in the field between 1949 and early 2020. The Louvain community detection algorithm was applied to the graph in order to identify existing research communities. The analysis discovered twelve top-level communities: access control, authentication, biometrics, cryptography (I & II), cyber-physical systems, information hiding, intrusion detection, malwares, quantum cryptography, sensor networks, and usable security. These top-level communities were in turn composed of a total of 80 sub-communities. The analysis results are presented for each community in descriptive text, sub-community graphs, and tables with, for example, the most-cited papers and authors. A comparison between the detected communities and topical areas defined by other related work, is also presented, demonstrating a greater researcher emphasis on cryptography, quantum cryptography, information hiding and biometrics, at the expense of laws and regulation, risk management and governance, and security software lifecycle.