Characterizing the Power of Moving Target Defense via Cyber Epidemic Dynamics

Submitted by shouhuai on Wed, 09/17/2014 - 6:31pm

Title	Characterizing the Power of Moving Target Defense via Cyber Epidemic Dynamics
Publication Type	Conference Paper
Year of Publication	2014
Authors	Han, Yujuan, Lu, Wenlian, Xu, Shouhuai
Conference Name	Proceedings of the 2014 Symposium and Bootcamp on the Science of Security
Publisher	ACM
Conference Location	Raleigh, NC, USA
ISBN Number	978-1-4503-2907-1
Keywords	ACM CCS, CPS Technologies, cyber epidemic dynamics, cybersecurity dynamics, epidemic threshold, Foundations, Modeling, moving target defense, Moving-Target Defense, Quantitative Verification, science of security, security models, Systems Engineering, Systems Security, Validation and Verification
Abstract	Moving Target Defense (MTD) can enhance the resilience of cyber systems against attacks. Although there have been many MTD techniques, there is no systematic understanding and quantitative characterization of the power of MTD. In this paper, we propose to use a cyber epidemic dynamics approach to characterize the power of MTD. We define and investigate two complementary measures that are applicable when the defender aims to deploy MTD to achieve a certain security goal. One measure emphasizes the maximum portion of time during which the system can afford to stay in an undesired configuration (or posture), without considering the cost of deploying MTD. The other measure emphasizes the minimum cost of deploying MTD, while accommodating that the system has to stay in an undesired configuration (or posture) for a given portion of time. Our analytic studies lead to algorithms for optimally deploying MTD.
URL	http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2600176.2600180
DOI	10.1145/2600176.2600180
Citation Key	Han:2014:CPM:2600176.2600180

Groups:

Science of Security VO