Visible to the public A System for Interactive Examination of Learned Security Policies

TitleA System for Interactive Examination of Learned Security Policies
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2022
AuthorsHammar, Kim, Stadler, Rolf
Conference NameNOMS 2022-2022 IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium
KeywordsAutomation, Behavioral sciences, emulation, human factors, Markov decision processes, Markov processes, MDP, Metrics, Network security, pomdp, Probability distribution, process control, pubcrawl, reinforcement learning, Resiliency, Scalability, security policies, Software
AbstractWe present a system for interactive examination of learned security policies. It allows a user to traverse episodes of Markov decision processes in a controlled manner and to track the actions triggered by security policies. Similar to a software debugger, a user can continue or or halt an episode at any time step and inspect parameters and probability distributions of interest. The system enables insight into the structure of a given policy and in the behavior of a policy in edge cases. We demonstrate the system with a network intrusion use case. We examine the evolution of an IT infrastructure's state and the actions prescribed by security policies while an attack occurs. The policies for the demonstration have been obtained through a reinforcement learning approach that includes a simulation system where policies are incrementally learned and an emulation system that produces statistics that drive the simulation runs.
DOI10.1109/NOMS54207.2022.9789707
Citation Keyhammar_system_2022