Dr. Andrea Matwyshyn is a full professor in the law school and engineering school at Penn State, the Associate Dean of Innovation at Penn State Law, and the founding faculty director of both the Penn State PILOT Lab (Policy Innovation Lab of Tomorrow), an interdisciplinary technology policy lab, and the Manglona Lab for Gender and Economic Equity, a technology equity lab and clinic.
She has also worked in both the private and public sector, most recently in 2023 as a Senior Special Advisor on Information Security and Data Privacy to the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Office of Enforcement and a Senior Special Advisor on Law, Technology, and the Digital Economy to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. Her first hackercon talk was at BlackHat USA in 2003, and she has previously served as a specialty reviewer on the DEF CON CFP Review team.
Twitter: @amatwyshyn
Cybernation: The FUD, Facts, and Future of Software Liability and Security
When the 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy called for “shifting liability to promote secure development practices,” the response from the security (and legal) community often overstated the novelty of the proposal. We have already been living with (various forms of) software liability for confidentiality, integrity, and availability failures for over two decades. This talk clarifies the legal landscape of both what already exists and the likely paths for the future. Cautioning against various security dystopias including Hannah Arendt’s “cybernation,” this talk offers suggestions on buildouts to existing threat modeling frameworks to explicitly consider factors used by courts and regulators to determine liability. These buildouts can better align the security team and in-house counsel in a joint defensive enterprise. But, two scaling issues will remain: the need for a technology regulator of last resort (a “TRoLR”) and a security community-driven model of professionalism.
We are pleased to announce that 
