Prerequisite to Measure Information Security
A State of the Art Literature Review
Rainer Diesch
1,2
, Matthias Pfaff
1,2
and Helmut Krcmar
2
1
fortiss GmbH, An-Institut der Technischen Universit
¨
at M
¨
unchen, Guerickestr. 25, 80805 M
¨
unchen, Germany
2
Chair of Information Systems, Technischen Universit
¨
at M
¨
unchen, Boltzmannstr. 3, M
¨
unchen, Germany
Keywords:
Security Measurement, Security Metrics, Cyber Security, Information Security, Literature Review.
Abstract:
The field of information security is growing in research and practice over the past years. Recent studies
highlight a gap in measuring and monitoring information security. In this context various definitions and
synonymous expressions exist to describe information security. The aim of the work is to compare and delimit
the various terms in this field of research and give a thematic overview of current articles in place. In particular,
five dimensions of information security are developed and outlined. Additionally, an overview of possible
research directions in the field of measuring and monitoring information security is provided.
1 INTRODUCTION
The interest in aspects of information security has in-
creased significantly in recent years. There are tech-
nical, behavioral, managerial, philosophical and or-
ganizational aspects which address the protection of
assets and mitigation of threats (Crossler et al., 2013).
These aspects are not to be ignored for organizations
since these can lead to great harm in case of dis-
regard. (Frizell, 2015) reported a damage of $15m
within one-quarter for Sony Pictures because of a se-
curity breach. This cost only included the direct costs
of cleaning up the systems. The damage caused by
the loss of reputation and other factors were not in-
cluded. In 2016, the ransomware ’wannacry’ infected
thousands of computers in more than 150 countries.
The damage was not only economically as people like
patients were affected as their appointments were can-
celed based on system errors (Bentkower, 2017). Or-
ganizations are not just affected because of potential
economic damage but also of legal requirements like
the security-law in Germany (Bundesanzeiger, 2015).
Recent literature reviews on information security
pointed out the need for intensified research in mea-
suring and monitoring information security related
data (D’Arcy and Herath, 2011; Crossler et al., 2013;
Fenz et al., 2014; Sommestad et al., 2014). This is
an obligatory aspect of information security manage-
ment for making good decisions (Bayuk, 2013). Also,
accurate models of the security problem are not in
place (D’Arcy and Herath, 2011). A problem which
causes a lack of measurement of information secu-
rity aspects is that the identification of security related
data is not well-known (Fenz et al., 2014). But a re-
quirement to collect and measure security related data
is to understand the success factors of information se-
curity (Sommestad et al., 2014).
The aim of this work is to gain an overview of cur-
rent research in the field of measuring information se-
curity. A state-of-the-art literature analysis is carried
out to obtain a comprehensive overview of the area.
The goal is not just to show the literature but also to
define the different terms in place. Since the under-
standing is a requirement for measurement, a defini-
tion becomes indispensable. Thematic classes of the
research area are needed to observe and assign future
research.
The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 out-
lines the used method with the scope and the search
process to collect relevant literature. Section 3 con-
sists of a descriptive analysis, the extracted definitions
and thematic classification of the investigated liter-
ature. Part 4 shows current research challenges for
each of the classes. Finally, this work concludes with
a conclusion and limitation section.
2 METHOD
To provide a comprehensible literature review, the
method of (Webster and Watson, 2002) and the tool-
Diesch, R., Pfaff, M. and Krcmar, H.
Prerequisite to Measure Information Security - A State of the Art Literature Review.
DOI: 10.5220/0006545602070215
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP 2018), pages 207-215
ISBN: 978-989-758-282-0
Copyright © 2018 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
207
Table 1: Search process matrix.
Group Resource Hits[KW] Hits[TA] Relevant
Information
Security
Information Management and Computer Security 99 7 7
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing 8 1 1
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security 7 0 0
Computers & Security 84 12 9
Databases
Google Scholar 100 11 9
ScienceDirect 41 6 4
OpacPlus 110 17 11
Backward 10 10
Forward 24 19
Total 449 88 70
set of (vom Brocke et al., 2009) was used. The spe-
cific goals of this review are as follows:
1. Identify, define and delimit different terms in the
field of information security.
2. Assign the relevant literature to the definitions and
compare it with the used terms of the literature
itself.
3. Thematic classification of the literature and show
current research gaps.
Search Process: Initially, a keyword search is per-
formed within peer-reviewed journals to select high
quality articles. Journals from the security field were
selected within the Scimago Journal & Country Rank
(SJR) with the condition that they are part of the cat-
egories security, safety, risk or reliability. Two jour-
nals are added because they were used often in the
basis literature reviews of (D’Arcy and Herath, 2011;
Crossler et al., 2013; Fenz et al., 2014; Sommestad
et al., 2014). These are ’Computers & Security’ and
’Information Management & Computer Security’. To
provide most of the relevant literature the databases
ScienceDirect, OpacPlus and Google Scholar were
added to the search. As the most relevant literature
can be found within the first 100 result of Google
Scholar the search was limited to these result set (Silic
and Back, 2014). To limit the results the following
keyword-string were used.
(it OR information OR cyber)
AND (resilience OR security)
AND (factors OR kpi OR measures OR metrics
OR measurement OR indicator OR management)
The first iteration of the search process resulted
in a number of hits (Hits[KW]) which are shown in
Table 1. After that, technical articles and those which
are not related to the search topic were excluded based
on their title and abstract (Hits[TA]). Finally, articles
which described metrics or success factors of infor-
mation security were marked as relevant. After that,
a forward and backward search was carried out to get
results which are relevant and were not yet found. The
backward search contained all articles which were
referenced in the previous iteration and which are of
relevance for the information security measurement
topic. Google Scholar (scholar.google.de) was used
with its function ’Cited by’ in order to identify all ar-
ticles which reference the selected one.
3 FINDINGS
First, a descriptive statistic was done to get a back-
ground of the research area. The last row of table 1
shows the total amount of articles found in the litera-
ture. Only 15.59% of the original articles out of the
first search round could be marked as relevant. This
leads to the assumption that there are many differ-
ent phenomena described in the research area. The
high amount of articles also assumes the importance
and presence in research. Many articles were identi-
fied in the forward and backward search (29) within
conferences. This can be seen as an indication that
the topic is still at the beginning of research. Techni-
cally oriented journals just show up with one relevant
article. The quantification of information security is
therefore mainly part of the security management or
related area and not technical-driven.
Since there are many definitions and terms of in-
formation security in the literature, the next subsec-
tion compares and delimits them. Finally, a classifi-
cation of the relevant literature in thematic classes are
developed to better track and monitor future research.
3.1 The Terms in Information Security
A lot of different terms which describe ’information
security’ are in place during the review. These are
’Information Systems Security’, ’IT Security’, ’Infor-
mation Security’, ’Cyber Security’ and ’Cyber Re-
silience’.
The basis of the delimitation in this article is the
work of (von Solms and van Niekerk, 2013). They
ICISSP 2018 - 4th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
208
defined three terms in the security area. ’Informa-
tion Security’ (IS), ’Information and Communica-
tion Technology Security’ (ICT) and ’Cyber Security’
(CS). The delimitation of the terms is based on the
assets which are protected. In this case, ICT is the
protection of information which is stored or transmit-
ted via a technical system. ’IT Security’ or ’Systems
Security’ are defined as synonyms to ICT. IS differs
from this because it is the protection of information
which can be stored or transmitted without using tech-
nical systems. ICT is a part of IS because IS includes
the protection of the underlying technology. CS now
describes the protection of assets without any infor-
mation but with a relationship to them. A bugging
operation is an example of this. A technical system
(phone) was attacked which has ’access’ to informa-
tion which is in human heads. CS is protecting techni-
cal systems which have or have no information stored
and therefore also includes ICT. ’Cyber Resilience’
(CR) firstly appears 2013 in form of resilience man-
agement (Crossler et al., 2013). The only attempt to
define CR was done by (Bj
¨
orck et al., 2015). They
showed 5 dimensions to differ CR from CS. One of
these is assets. CR is not just about the protection of
assets but also to ensure business delivery despite ad-
verse cyber events. The correlation between the terms
is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Delimitation of terms.
According to the definition of ICT, IS, CS and CR,
the literature was assigned respectively one or more of
these in two iterations. First, the article was assigned
the term, which the author had intended for this. The
basis of the assignment was the terms of the title, ab-
stracts and the keywords. Second, the articles were
assigned the terms according to the definition above.
This is done based on the context.
The result of the assignment shows that 23 out of
70 articles (32.86%) have the same assignment to the
terms for both iterations. It is noticeable that the terms
are often used as synonyms. Mainly IS is used as a
synonym for ICT. Articles that use the term IS (60)
often have just content of ICT included in the text (37)
and not IS as defined. All authors used CS and CR as
synonyms for ICT. The articles which describe CS or
CR used the term IS instead of them. In the present
literature, there are clear definitions of the terms, but
the terms are not used based on them.
3.2 Thematic Classification
The relevant literature of this review is about mea-
surement and metrics of ICT, IS, CS and CR. To ob-
serve papers in future and better understand the con-
text, there are several classes produced in this litera-
ture review which are based on the keywords of the
underlying articles. Each paper is assigned to one of
the classes which are shown in Table 2.
3.2.1 Security Management
’Information security management’ is used to
describe activities for the protection of valuable
information assets and mitigate various risks to infor-
mation coming from all aspects of the organizations
environment by applying the security technology and
management process (Ernest Chang and Ho, 2006).
In other words, it is about processes to control,
classify and manage information as well as different
guidelines and policies therefrom.
Organization and Governance: These articles deal
with organizational processes, policies and their
effectiveness. A subset of articles also provides
information and simulations of security investments
and the security economy within organizations.
There are also frameworks on how to set up a secure
environment with a culture and guides to good
policies included.
Awareness: The role of human in information secu-
rity is a substantial stream in research (Kraemer et al.,
2009). Therefore organizations have to consider
dealing with security awareness.
Evaluation: These articles deal with the question of
which success factors lead to good management or
which factors influence the success of implementing
a security management system. Another aspect is
the validation and verification of policies and factors
which causes better ones.
3.2.2 Security Measurement
Security metrics refer to the interpretation of mea-
surements of the security performance, level and
indicators (Savola and Heinonen, 2011). Therefore
Prerequisite to Measure Information Security - A State of the Art Literature Review
209
Table 2: Thematic classification of the literature.
Security
management
Organization
and
Governance
(Geer et al., 2003; Hong et al., 2003; Tr
`
eek, 2003; von Solms and von Solms, 2004; Gupta and
Hammond, 2005; Anderson and Moore, 2006; Ernest Chang and Ho, 2006; Johnson and
Goetz, 2007; Veiga and Eloff, 2007; Atoum et al., 2014; Narain Singh et al., 2014; Yaokumah,
2014; Fenz et al., 2014; AlHogail, 2015; Horne et al., 2017)
Awareness (Straub and Welke, 1998; Velki et al., 2014; Tran et al., 2016)
Evaluation (von Solms et al., 1994; Kraemer et al., 2009; Abu-Musa, 2010; Hall et al., 2011; Norman and
Yasin, 2012; Tu and Yuan, 2014; Alqahtani, 2015; Muthukrishnan and Palaniappan, 2016;
Azuwa et al., 2017)
Security
measurement
Development (Wang and Wulf, 1997; Sharman et al., 2004; Herrera, 2005; Tanna et al., 2005; Tashi and
Ghernaouti-H
´
elie, 2008; Sowa and Gabriel, 2009; Leon and Saxena, 2010; LeMay et al., 2011;
Idika and Bhargava, 2012; Jones and Horowitz, 2012; Tariq, 2012; Bayuk and Mostashari,
2013; Zalewski et al., 2014; Mazur et al., 2015; Collier et al., 2016; Young et al., 2016)
Taxonomy (Vaughn et al., 2003; Savola, 2007; Savola, 2009; Verendel, 2009; Purboyo et al., 2011;
Pendleton et al., 2017)
Security
Metrics
(Boyer and McQueen, 2007; Premaratne et al., 2008; Dogaheh, 2010; Jafari et al., 2010;
Mermigas et al., 2013; Holm and Afridi, 2015)
Effectiveness (Coronado et al., 2009; Bayuk, 2013; Savola, 2013)
Visualization (Savola and Heinonen, 2011)
Human Behavior (Gonzalez and Sawicka, 2002; Ifinedo, 2012; Crossler et al., 2013; Vance et al., 2014;
Montesdioca and Mac¸ada, 2015; Alavi et al., 2016)
Practical Frameworks (IT Governance Institute, 2007; NIST, S. P., 2008; ISO/IEC, 2009; Hayden, 2010; CCIB, 2017)
measurement is the process of estimating attributes
of an object while metrics refer to assign a value to
an object (Pendleton et al., 2017).
Development: There are methods to develop metrics
for information security aspects. Examples of them
are metrics which are developed based on different
approaches like Goal-Question-Metric (Savola, 2007;
Bayuk, 2013) or attack-graphs (Premaratne et al.,
2008; LeMay et al., 2011; Idika and Bhargava, 2012).
There are also frameworks with descriptions of good
metrics and how to implement them.
Taxonomy: The taxonomies in this class describe
and characterize different measurement approaches
and several classes of metrics which are based on the
objective and the measurement goal.
Security Metrics: A security metric is a quantitative
indicator for various targets in operational security
(Verendel, 2009). The articles focus on specific
metrics and evaluate or simulate them.
Effectiveness: The effectiveness of metrics to
measure information security is discussed here. The
articles compare different frameworks to generate
measurements and discuss different metrics in detail.
Visualization: The management has the requirement
to easily understand and therefore react very fast
to changed metrics (Jafari et al., 2010; Savola and
Heinonen, 2011). Therefore these articles deal with
an optimal visualization of complex metrics.
3.2.3 Human Behavior
Human behavior or human factors affecting informa-
tion security are not to be confused with the aware-
ness described above. These articles deal with dif-
ferent behavior theories like ’protection motivation’
or ’planned behavior’. The perspective of attackers
is included in form of social engineering attacks and
factors which can prevent them.
3.2.4 Practical Frameworks
Frameworks from practice which also called best-
practices are included. They are developed for practi-
tioners to deal with information security management
systems or security effectiveness.
4 DISCUSSION
The quantitative analysis of the relevant literature
revealed that under the subject of the measurement
of information security many phenomena can be
interpreted. An exact delimitation of the topic area
from others, such as management processes, would
be helpful for tracking this issue. In the case of
the definitions, it can be argued that there is less
research in CS and CR available than in ICT and IS.
Context is the measurement of information security.
Future research should pay attention to the correct
and uniform use of the concepts and develop them
further. The thematic classification shows potential
research areas in each of the different classes. The
ICISSP 2018 - 4th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
210
following part describes these research areas within
the different classes based on the given literature:
Security Management: To fundamentally make
decisions in the area of systems security it is neces-
sary to know the current information security status
within an organization and know the weaknesses
and where they are. This is currently still a gap
in research (von Solms et al., 1994; Johnson and
Goetz, 2007; Tu and Yuan, 2014; Horne et al., 2017).
(Mermigas et al., 2013) goes one step further and
says that organizations need to know how secure they
are at any given point in time. A requirement to do
this is the understanding of the success factors of
information security within organizations and how
they are related (Kraemer et al., 2009; Norman and
Yasin, 2012; Horne et al., 2017). If the security status
can be operationalized it is also possible to measure if
the security program as well as their countermeasures
or policies of the organization are effective or not.
This is also an undeveloped research task (Gupta and
Hammond, 2005; Fenz et al., 2014; Atoum et al.,
2014). The present literature review excludes those
articles which did not contain any security success
factors. Further work could show and categorize the
existing direct and indirect success factors which
are already in place. This could be the basis for an
empirical evaluation and a better understanding of
security in organizations.
Security Measurement: The measurement of secu-
rity as a property and the development of security
metrics itself are in a very early research stage and
quite underdeveloped (Savola, 2009; Savola and
Heinonen, 2011; Zalewski et al., 2014). Knowing
how to measure the security as well as the defense
level of organizations and generally of systems is a
gap in research (Vaughn et al., 2003; Purboyo et al.,
2011; Alavi et al., 2016). The area of measurement
goes also a step back and asks for practices to
measure the coverage of visibility. This is about
effective and adequate assessments of risks and assets
and how it can be monitored (Abu-Musa, 2010).
Specifically, there is a gap in explored metrics for the
measurement of information security, which are asso-
ciated with existing models and thus provide the basis
for cross-sectoral and organizational independent
security comparison (Sowa and Gabriel, 2009; Bayuk
and Mostashari, 2013). It is often the case that just
the security management program is measured and
not the security itself (Tashi and Ghernaouti-H
´
elie,
2008; Jafari et al., 2010). There is not just a gap in
developing and creating concrete metrics but also in
tools to gather information security related data and
monitor the security status (Wang and Wulf, 1997;
Boyer and McQueen, 2007; Crossler et al., 2013).
Based on this work, current metrics in place could be
shown and linked to the frameworks, success factors
and development models.
Human Behavior: Human behavior is little repre-
sented in this review. In case of measurement there is
an open question on how to capture actual behavior
(Crossler et al., 2013).
Practical Frameworks: Practical frameworks are
designed to help organizations to implement and use
security related information in management. The only
framework who describes metrics to monitor the se-
curity status says that these metrics are not cover-
ing the minimum security requirements (NIST, S. P.,
2008). Also, the automatic way to collect and mea-
sure the data is a requirement for good and repeatable
metrics (NIST, S. P., 2008). Other frameworks like
(IT Governance Institute, 2007; ISO/IEC, 2009) ad-
dresses just the effectiveness of security management
processes and not the security status of the assets and
environment itself. An empirical evaluation or test of
the described issues is not present literature.
5 CONCLUSION
There is a gap in measuring and monitoring in-
formation security in current research (D’Arcy and
Herath, 2011; Crossler et al., 2013; Fenz et al., 2014;
Sommestad et al., 2014). To develop a measurement
and collect information security related data, it is nec-
essary to understand information security and the suc-
cess factors influencing it (Sommestad et al., 2014).
This literature review after (Webster and Watson,
2002; vom Brocke et al., 2009) included journals of
the information security area as well as databases.
The search process results in the identification of 70
articles which are interesting for measuring informa-
tion security. The chronological analysis shows that
the topic has become more and more important in the
past years. Also, there are a lot of terms in place
which are used in different contexts. This becomes
clear as soon as the keywords, the title and the con-
tents of the articles are compared with respect to the
term. The delimitation of the terms is based on the
work of (von Solms and van Niekerk, 2013) and is
extended in this review based on the definitions of
(Bj
¨
orck et al., 2015) to get an overview of the current
terms and their usage. Past literature uses the terms as
synonyms which should be avoided in the future.
The thematic classification of the literature can
Prerequisite to Measure Information Security - A State of the Art Literature Review
211
help to capture future research and better assign them
a context. It is shown that the measurement of infor-
mation security is often a management topic. This is
useful because the measurement allows an objective
control and a well-based decision-making in connec-
tion to information security.
The relevant articles show that information se-
curity is necessary for organizations and decision-
makers. To manage, make good decisions and cap-
ture the current state of information security, a mea-
surement is needed (Bayuk, 2013). Current research
does not adequately cover this topic. Future research
should investigate in the definition of success fac-
tors for information security to fulfill the require-
ment of understanding security success factors (Krae-
mer et al., 2009; Norman and Yasin, 2012; Horne
et al., 2017) and define a current state of security
(von Solms et al., 1994; Johnson and Goetz, 2007;
Mermigas et al., 2013; Tu and Yuan, 2014; Horne
et al., 2017). Therefore concrete metrics and tools to
monitor these need to be developed (Wang and Wulf,
1997; Vaughn et al., 2003; Boyer and McQueen,
2007; Sowa and Gabriel, 2009; Purboyo et al., 2011;
Crossler et al., 2013; Bayuk and Mostashari, 2013;
Alavi et al., 2016). Future research could then evalu-
ate the effectiveness of security programs and actions
based on the security quantification (Gupta and Ham-
mond, 2005; Fenz et al., 2014; Atoum et al., 2014).
6 LIMITATIONS
The limitations are based on the search process. The
initial search was performed based on highly ranked
journals. Therefore it is possible that articles within
conferences or not included journals could influence
the results of this literature review. The same could
apply for articles which are excluded based on their
title and abstract. It cannot be ruled out that relevant
articles have been removed which does not outline to
the search topic but has relevant content. In order
to limit these shortcomings, the database search, as
well as the forward and backward search, was per-
formed. Moreover, this literature review does not
cover management or interdisciplinary journals which
could also be interesting for measuring security.
REFERENCES
Abu-Musa, A. (2010). Information security governance in
saudi organizations: An empirical study. Information
Management & Computer Security, 18(4):226–276.
Alavi, R., Islam, S., and Mouratidis, H. (2016). An in-
formation security risk-driven investment model for
analysing human factors. Information and Computer
Security, 24(2):205–227.
AlHogail, A. (2015). Design and validation of information
security culture framework. Computers in Human Be-
havior, 49:567–575.
Alqahtani, A. (2015). Towards a framework for the poten-
tial cyber-terrorist threat to critical national infrastruc-
ture. Information and Computer Security, 23(5):532–
569.
Anderson, R. and Moore, T. (2006). The economics
of information security. Science (New York, N.Y.) ,
314:610–613.
Atoum, I., Otoom, A., and Abu Ali, A. (2014). A holistic
cyber security implementation framework. Informa-
tion Management & Computer Security, 22(3):251–
264.
Azuwa, M. P., Sahib, S., and Shamsuddin, S. (2017).
Technical security metrics model in compliance
with iso/iec 27001 standard. International Journal
of Cyber-Security and Digital Forensics (IJCSDF),
1(4):280–288.
Bayuk, J. and Mostashari, A. (2013). Measuring systems
security. Systems Engineering, 16(1):1–14.
Bayuk, J. L. (2013). Security as a theoretical attribute con-
struct. Computers & Security, 37:155–175.
Bentkower, M. (2017). Assessing the real damage of the
’wannacry’ malware attack.
Bj
¨
orck, F., Henkel, M., Stirna, J., and Zdravkovic, J. (2015).
Cyber resilience fundamentals for a definition. In
New Contributions in Information Systems and Tech-
nologies, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Com-
puting, pages 311–316. Springer International Pub-
lishing, Cham.
Boyer, W. and McQueen, M. (2007). Ideal based cyber se-
curity technical metrics for control systems. In Crit-
ical information infrastructures security, pages 246–
260.
Bundesanzeiger (2015). Gesetz zur erhoehung der
sicherheit informationstechnischer systeme (it-
sicherheitsgesetz). Bundesgesetzblatt, 1(31):1324–
1331.
CCIB (2017). Common Criteria for Information Technol-
ogy Security Evaluation: Part 2: Security functional
components, Version 3.1, Revision 5. Common Crite-
ria.
Collier, Z. A., Panwar, M., Ganin, A. A., Kott, A., and
Linkov, I. (2016). Security metrics in industrial con-
trol systems. In Colbert, E. J. M. and Kott, A., editors,
Cyber-security of SCADA and other industrial con-
trol systems, Advances in Information Security, pages
167–185. Springer, Switzerland.
Coronado, A. S., Mahmood, M. A., Pahnila, S., and Lu-
ciano, E. M. (2009). Measuring effectiveness of in-
formation systems security: An empirical research. In
15th Americas Conference on Information Systems.
Crossler, R. E., Johnston, A. C., Lowry, P. B., Hu, Q.,
Warkentin, M., and Baskerville, R. (2013). Future di-
ICISSP 2018 - 4th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
212
rections for behavioral information security research.
Computers & Security, 32:90–101.
D’Arcy, J. and Herath, T. (2011). A review and analysis of
deterrence theory in the is security literature: Making
sense of the disparate findings. European Journal of
Information Systems, 20(6):643–658.
Dogaheh, M. A. (2010). Introducing a framework for se-
curity measurements. In IEEE International Confer-
ence on Information Theory and Information Security,
pages 638–641.
Ernest Chang, S. and Ho, C. B. (2006). Organizational fac-
tors to the effectiveness of implementing information
security management. Industrial Management & Data
Systems, 106(3):345–361.
Fenz, S., Heurix, J., Neubauer, T., and Pechstein, F. (2014).
Current challenges in information security risk man-
agement. Information Management & Computer Se-
curity, 22(5):410–430.
Frizell, S. (2015). Sony the interview hack: Studio spending
$15 million to deal with it.
Geer, D., Hoo, K. S., and Jaquith, A. (2003). Information
security: Why the future belongs to the quants. IEEE
Security & Privacy Magazine, 1(4):24–32.
Gonzalez, J. J. and Sawicka, A. (2002). A framework
for human factors in information security. In 2002
WSEAS International Conference on Information Se-
curity, Hardware/Software Codesign, E-Commerce
and Computer Networks, pages 1871–1877.
Gupta, A. and Hammond, R. (2005). Information sys-
tems security issues and decisions for small busi-
nesses. Information Management & Computer Secu-
rity, 13(4):297–310.
Hall, J. H., Sarkani, S., and Mazzuchi, T. A. (2011). Im-
pacts of organizational capabilities in information se-
curity. Information Management & Computer Secu-
rity, 19(3):155–176.
Hayden, L. (2010). IT security metrics: A practical frame-
work for measuring security & protecting data. Mc-
Graw Hill, New York.
Herrera, S. (2005). Information security management met-
rics development. In Proceedings / 39th Annual 2005
International Carnahan Conference on Security Tech-
nology, pages 51–56.
Holm, H. and Afridi, K. K. (2015). An expert-based inves-
tigation of the common vulnerability scoring system.
Computers & Security, 53:18–30.
Hong, K.-S., Chi, Y.-P., Chao, L. R., and Tang, J.-H. (2003).
An integrated system theory of information security
management. Information Management & Computer
Security, 11(5):243–248.
Horne, C. A., Maynard, S. B., and Ahmad, A. (2017). In-
formation security strategy in organisations: Review,
discussion and future research. Australasian Journal
of Information Systems, 21.
Idika, N. and Bhargava, B. (2012). Extending attack graph-
based security metrics and aggregating their applica-
tion. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure
Computing, 9(1):75–85.
Ifinedo, P. (2012). Understanding information systems se-
curity policy compliance: An integration of the theory
of planned behavior and the protection motivation the-
ory. Computers & Security, 31(1):83–95.
ISO/IEC (2009). ISO/IEC 27004:2009(E) - Information
technology - Security techniques - Information secu-
rity management - Measurement. ISO/IEC.
IT Governance Institute (2007). COBIT 4.1: Framework,
control objectives, management guidelines, maturity
models. IT Governance Institute, Rolling Meadows.
Jafari, S., Mtenzi, F., Fitzpatrick, R., and O’Shea, B. (2010).
Security metrics for e-healthcare information systems:
A domain specific metrics approach. International
Journal of Digital Society (IJDS), 1(4):238–245.
Johnson, M. E. and Goetz, E. (2007). Embedding informa-
tion security into the organization. IEEE Security &
Privacy Magazine, 5(3):16–24.
Jones, R. A. and Horowitz, B. (2012). A system-aware
cyber security architecture. Systems Engineering,
15(2):225–240.
Kraemer, S., Carayon, P., and Clem, J. (2009). Human and
organizational factors in computer and information se-
curity: Pathways to vulnerabilities. Computers & Se-
curity, 28(7):509–520.
LeMay, E., Ford, M. D., Keefe, K., Sanders, W. H., and
Muehrcke, C. (2011). Model-based security met-
rics using adversary view security evaluation (advise).
In Eighth International Conference on Quantitative
Evaluation of SysTems, pages 191–200.
Leon, P. G. and Saxena, A. (2010). An approach to quan-
titatively measure information security. In 3rd India
Software Engineering Conference.
Mazur, K., Ksiezopolski, B., and Kotulski, Z. (2015). The
robust measurement method for security metrics gen-
eration. The Computer Journal, 58(10):2280–2296.
Mermigas, D., Patsakis, C., and Pirounias, S. (2013).
Quantification of information systems security with
stochastic calculus. In Proceedings of the Eighth An-
nual Cyber Security and Information Intelligence Re-
search Workshop, pages 1–9.
Montesdioca, G. P. Z. and Mac¸ada, A. C. G. (2015).
Measuring user satisfaction with information security
practices. Computers & Security, 48:267–280.
Muthukrishnan, S. M. and Palaniappan, S. (2016). Security
metrics maturity model for operational security. In
IEEE Symposium on Computer Applications and In-
dustrial Electronics, pages 101–106.
Narain Singh, A., Gupta, M. P., and Ojha, A. (2014). Iden-
tifying factors of “organizational information secu-
rity management”. Journal of Enterprise Information
Management, 27(5):644–667.
NIST, S. P. (2008). 800-55r1: Performance measurement
guide for information security. National Institute of
Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD.
Norman, A. A. and Yasin, N. M. (2012). Information sys-
tems security management (issm) success factor: Ret-
rospection from the scholars. In Proceedings of the
11th European Conference on Information warfare
and security.
Pendleton, M., Garcia-Lebron, R., Cho, J.-H., and Xu, S.
(2017). A survey on systems security metrics. ACM
Computing Surveys, 49(4):1–35.
Prerequisite to Measure Information Security - A State of the Art Literature Review
213
Premaratne, U., Samarabandu, J., Sidhu, T., Beresh, B., and
Tan, J.-C. (2008). Application of security metrics in
auditing computer network security: A case study. In
4th International Conference on Information and Au-
tomation for Sustainability, pages 200–205.
Purboyo, T. W., Rahardjo, B., and Kuspriyanto (2011). Se-
curity metrics: A brief survey. In 2011 2nd Interna-
tional Conference on Instrumentation, Communica-
tions, Information Technology and Biomedical Engi-
neering, pages 79–82.
Savola, R. (2007). Towards a security metrics taxonomy
for the information and communication technology in-
dustry. In International Conference on Software En-
gineering Advances (ICSEA), pages 60–66.
Savola, R. M. (2009). A security metrics taxonomization
model for software-intensive systems. Journal of In-
formation Processing Systems, 5(4):197–206.
Savola, R. M. (2013). Quality of security metrics and mea-
surements. Computers & Security, 37:78–90.
Savola, R. M. and Heinonen, P. (2011). A visualization and
modeling tool for security metrics and measurements
management. In 2011 Information Security for South
Africa, pages 1–8.
Sharman, R., Rao, R., and Upadhyaya, S. (2004). Metrics
for information security: A literature review. In 10th
Americas Conference on Information Systems.
Silic, M. and Back, A. (2014). Information security: Criti-
cal review and future directions for research. Informa-
tion Management & Computer Security, 22(3):279–
308.
Sommestad, T., Hallberg, J., Lundholm, K., and Bengtsson,
J. (2014). Variables influencing information security
policy compliance: A systematic review of quantita-
tive studies. Information Management & Computer
Security, 22(1):42–75.
Sowa, S. and Gabriel, R. (2009). Multidimensional man-
agement of information security: A metrics based ap-
proach merging business and information security top-
ics. In International Conference on Availability, Reli-
ability and Security, pages 750–755. IEEE.
Straub, D. W. and Welke, R. J. (1998). Coping with sys-
tems risk: Security planning models for management
decision making. MIS Quarterly, 22(4):441.
Tanna, G. B., Gupta, M., Rao, H. R., and Upadhyaya, S.
(2005). Information assurance metric development
framework for electronic bill presentment and pay-
ment systems using transaction and workflow analy-
sis. Decision Support Systems, 41(1):242–261.
Tariq, M. I. (2012). Towards information security met-
rics framework for cloud computing. International
Journal of Cloud Computing and Services Science (IJ-
CLOSER), 1(4).
Tashi, I. and Ghernaouti-H
´
elie, S. (2008). Efficient security
measurements and metrics for risk assessment. In The
Third International Conference on Internet Monitor-
ing and Protection, pages 131–138.
Tran, H., Campos-Nanez, E., Fomin, P., and Wasek, J.
(2016). Cyber resilience recovery model to combat
zero-day malware attacks. Computers & Security,
61:19–31.
Tr
`
eek, D. (2003). An integral framework for information
systems security management. Computers & Security,
22(4):337–360.
Tu, Z. and Yuan, Y. (2014). Critical success factors analy-
sis on effective information security management: A
literature review. In 20th Americas Conference on In-
formation Systems.
Vance, A., Eargle, D., Anderson, B. B., and Kirwan, C. B.
(2014). Using measures of risk perception to pre-
dict information security behavior: Insights from elec-
troencephalography (eeg). Journal of the Association
for Information Systems, 15:679–722.
Vaughn, R. B., Henning, R., and Siraj, A. (2003). Informa-
tion assurance measures and metrics - state of practice
and proposed taxonomy. In Proceedings of the 36th
Annual Hawaii International Conference on System
Sciences.
Veiga, A. D. and Eloff, J. H. P. (2007). An information
security governance framework. Information Systems
Management, 24(4):361–372.
Velki, T., Solic, K., and Ocevcic, H. (2014). Develop-
ment of users’ information security awareness ques-
tionnaire (uisaq) ongoing work. In 37th Inter-
national Convention on Information and Communi-
cation Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics
(MIPRO), pages 1417–1421.
Verendel, V. (2009). Quantified security is a weak hypoth-
esis: A critical survey of results and assumptions. In
Proceedings of the 2009 workshop on New security
paradigms workshop.
vom Brocke, J., Simons, A., Niehaves, B., Riemer, K., Plat-
tfaut, R., and Cleven, A. (2009). Reconstructing the
giant: On the importance of rigour in documenting the
literature search process. 17th European Conference
on Information Systems (ECIS).
von Solms, B. and von Solms, R. (2004). The 10 deadly
sins of information security management. Computers
& Security, 23(5):371–376.
von Solms, R., van der Haar, H., von Solms, S. H., and
Caelli, W. J. (1994). A framework for informa-
tion security evaluation. Information & Management,
26(3):143–153.
von Solms, R. and van Niekerk, J. (2013). From informa-
tion security to cyber security. Computers & Security,
38:97–102.
Wang, C. and Wulf, W. A. (1997). Towards a framework for
security measurement. In 20th National Information
Systems Security Conference, pages 522–533.
Webster, J. and Watson, R. T. (2002). Analyzing the past
to prepare for the future: Writing a literature review.
MIS Quarterly, 26(2):xiii–xxiii.
Yaokumah, W. (2014). Information security gover-
nance implementation within ghanaian industry sec-
tors. Information Management & Computer Security,
22(3):235–250.
Young, D., Lopez, J., Rice, M., Ramsey, B., and McTasney,
R. (2016). A framework for incorporating insurance
in critical infrastructure cyber risk strategies. Inter-
national Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection,
14:43–57.
ICISSP 2018 - 4th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy
214
Zalewski, J., Drager, S., McKeever, W., and Kornecki, A. J.
(2014). Measuring security: A challenge for the gen-
eration. In 2014 Federated Conference on Computer
Science and Information Systems, Annals of Com-
puter Science and Information Systems, pages 131–
140.
Prerequisite to Measure Information Security - A State of the Art Literature Review
215