The principles of science relate to cybersecurity because in order to further advance the cybersecurity field, researchers must conduct social science research. While these research studies are not conducted in labs like typical scientific studies, they still use the same principles, including research questions, hypotheses, and variables.

Research questions allow cybersecurity researchers to establish what they wish to study over the course of their research. Researchers then take these questions and create hypotheses, which are testable statements predicting how two variables are related. These variables, which can be independent or dependent, are what is observed in the study. Independent variables are directly manipulated, while dependent variables are expected to change as a result of changes to the independent variable.

These scientific principles allow cybersecurity researchers to examine specific topics within cybersecurity and test different solutions for observed vulnerabilities.