How to search the latest security academic papers
Introduction
While following the state-of-the-art of security-related technologies and gathering information is a daily job for engineers, we engineers often take a practical approach to gathering information. For example, when I gather security-related news, I check the news site of the security industry.
And, there is also an academic approach. It is to search academic papers (In English there are several ways of saying: Thesis, Dissertation, research paper, or paper - but I do not go into detail)
Journals
In this article I would like to introduce how you can find academic papers of your interest.
Academic papers are published in Journals (scientific journal), which are the most up-to-date collections of the latest findings or research. When you are looking for security articles in journals, you will find the latest and well-examined research explanations. The journal of the top conference of security, for example USENIX Security is what we should search for first.
Here are the accepted papers of the latest USENIX security conference.
However, journals are not free to read then not easy to access them. And the journals are peer-reviewed before publication to keep their high quality and it takes longer sometimes.
Recently, especially in the field of Generative AI research, new research is being submitted one after another, and peer review may not be able to keep up.
PrePrint
There is another source. PrePrint is an academic paper which is not peer-reviewed, but examined by PrePrint server administrators. PrePrint is, as far as I know, free of charge to read/download and open to the public.
The most popular public server for PrePrint is ArXiv. I often use this site to write an article. Many PrePrints have been submitted, especially with the rapid development of the field of Artificial Intelligence. These are good for following the latest research and findings.
For example, searching the topic of AI security, Submission of the papers is almost daily paces.
Some of the preprints have already been published in the journal or were uploaded at the same time as journal submissions, so some of the most recent and important papers may be freely available in preprint form. On the other hand, some of the studies are not very significant, since the journals are maintained in quality by peer review, whereas the PrePrints have only a brief review process.
In some PrePrint, not only the proposed theory, the results of PoC and the source code are available on GitHub.
To find a topic of interest, first select the subject "Computer Science" and click "Search", then enter the keywords you want to know and search them.
How to read the academic papers
You do not have to read the academic papers from the beginning to the end. Before reading, let us see the structure of the paper. All academic papers have an Abstract, Introduction, and Conclusion section (In most papers, experiment, results, and discussion sections are placed between the Introduction and Conclusion). The Abstract placed at the beginning of the paper and it is usually short, so read this section first. By reading this you can grasp what the academic paper tells you.
Then read the Introduction section to grasp the background of the research, then the relative position of the research and the relation with other similar research papers. Most of the academic papers are written in relation to similar research, so the relationship with the other papers are important.
The Connected Papers can visualize the relationship of the papers. For example search with the keyword "AI security" and browse a paper, it displays as below.
And then read the conclusion to see if there is the information you are looking for. The conclusion of the paper is a confirmation of what is presented in the introduction. If you want to know more, then go back to the main section of the papers and read through.