Simulation-based Approaches to Studying Effectiveness of Moving-Target Network Defense

Abstract

Moving-target defense has been hypothesized as a potential game changer in cyber defense, in- cluding that for computer networks. However there has been little work to study how much proac- tively changing a network's configuration can in- crease the difficulty for attackers and thus improve the resilience of the system under attack. In this pa- per we present a basic design schema of a moving- target network defense system. Based on this design schema, we conducted a simulation-based study to investigate the degree to which proactively chang- ing a network's various parameters can decrease an adversary's chance for success. We believe this is an important first step towards understanding why and how the concept of a moving target can be suc- cessfully applied to computer network defenses.