Cybersecurity: Past, Present and Future

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of cybersecurity's evolution, current challenges, and future research directions, emphasizing AI integration, explainability, and emerging technologies like IoT and cloud computing.

Contribution

It offers an extensive review of cybersecurity domains, highlights recent advancements, and discusses future research areas including AI collaboration and explainable AI in cybersecurity.

Findings

Cybersecurity encompasses software, hardware, malware evolution, biometrics, cyber intelligence, and forensics.

Emerging areas include hybrid AI and explainable AI for enhanced security.

Future research emphasizes AI-human collaboration and interpretability in cybersecurity.

Abstract

The digital transformation has created a new digital space known as cyberspace. This new cyberspace has improved the workings of businesses, organizations, governments, society as a whole, and day to day life of an individual. With these improvements come new challenges, and one of the main challenges is security. The security of the new cyberspace is called cybersecurity. Cyberspace has created new technologies and environments such as cloud computing, smart devices, IoTs, and several others. To keep pace with these advancements in cyber technologies there is a need to expand research and develop new cybersecurity methods and tools to secure these domains and environments. This book is an effort to introduce the reader to the field of cybersecurity, highlight current issues and challenges, and provide future directions to mitigate or resolve them. The main specializations of cybersecurity covered in this book are software security, hardware security, the evolution of malware, biometrics, cyber intelligence, and cyber forensics. We must learn from the past, evolve our present and improve the future. Based on this objective, the book covers the past, present, and future of these main specializations of cybersecurity. The book also examines the upcoming areas of research in cyber intelligence, such as hybrid augmented and explainable artificial intelligence (AI). Human and AI collaboration can significantly increase the performance of a cybersecurity system. Interpreting and explaining machine learning models, i.e., explainable AI is an emerging field of study and has a lot of potentials to improve the role of AI in cybersecurity.