Visible to the public Further refinements to the foundations of cyber zone defense

TitleFurther refinements to the foundations of cyber zone defense
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2017
AuthorsMitchell, R., Walkup, E.
Conference NameMILCOM 2017 - 2017 IEEE Military Communications Conference (MILCOM)
Date PublishedOct. 2017
PublisherIEEE
ISBN Number978-1-5386-0595-0
KeywordsAdaptation models, Biological system modeling, composability, computer security, Hardware, intrusion tolerance, Mathematical model, Modeling, Predictive models, pubcrawl, Resiliency, security, simulation
Abstract

Sophisticated cyber attacks by state-sponsored and criminal actors continue to plague government and industrial infrastructure. Intuitively, partitioning cyber systems into survivable, intrusion tolerant compartments is a good idea. This prevents witting and unwitting insiders from moving laterally and reaching back to their command and control (C2) servers. However, there is a lack of artifacts that can predict the effectiveness of this approach in a realistic setting. We extend earlier work by relaxing simplifying assumptions and providing a new attacker-facing metric. In this article, we propose new closed-form mathematical models and a discrete time simulation to predict three critical statistics: probability of compromise, probability of external host compromise and probability of reachback. The results of our new artifacts agree with one another and with previous work, which suggests they are internally valid and a viable method to evaluate the effectiveness of cyber zone defense.

URLhttps://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8170783
DOI10.1109/MILCOM.2017.8170783
Citation Keymitchell_further_2017