IHMC partners with California-based research institute to take aim at the psychology of cyber attackers

The battle against cyber attackers has often felt like an uphill slog. The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) is part of a team looking to turn that tide.

This spring, IHMC partnered with California-based nonprofit research institute SRI to take aim at the psychology of cyber attackers to better defend against their efforts.

The project is funded by Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) — the research and development arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — which launched it in February 2024. DNI refers to the project as Reimagining Security with Cyberpsychology-Informed Network Defenses (ReSCIND)

SRI is one of five organizations IARPA has contracted with for the effort. As part of SRI’s team, IHMC is involved in all aspects of the research, but its unique contribution is the human subjects research expertise Senior Research Scientist Dr. Anil Raj and Research Scientist Dr. Brodie Mather and their IHMC team bring to the project.

The goal is to use psychology-informed defenses to understand cognitive vulnerabilities of an attacker individually and tailor the defenses to the vulnerabilities of that attacker.

“The ultimate goal of the program is reclaim agency in the battle against cyber attacks,” Mather said. “It has felt like a bit of a losing battle, fighting off these attacks for organizations of all sizes. We hope this could be a way for organizations to reclaim some of their time and agency in defending against these attacks.”

Cyber attackers typically take advantage of human errors, but most cyber defenses do not similarly exploit attackers’ cognitive weaknesses. The ReSCIND project aims to flip this script.

By combining traditional cybersecurity practices with cyberpsychology expertise, IARPA is set to engineer a first-of-its-kind cyber technology that makes an attacker’s job harder.

SRI noted in its news release that the technology at the heart of this project could be revolutionary in the field, by measuring, understanding, and exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities to prevent cyber attackers from achieving their goals effectively and efficiently.

The four-year project is multi-phased, with five major technical challenges that IHMC will helped lead the work in. That work began this spring and phase one is expected to take approximately 18 months.

IHMC is a not-for-profit research institute of the Florida University System where researchers pioneer science and technology aimed at leveraging and extending human capabilities. IHMC researchers and staff collaborate extensively with the government, industry and academia to help develop breakthrough technologies. IHMC research partners have included: DARPA, the National Science Foundation, NASA, Army, Navy, Air Force, National Institutes of Health, IBM, Microsoft, Honda, Boeing, Lockheed, and many others.