Biblio

Resilience and antifragility under duress present significant challenges for autonomic and self-adaptive systems operating in contested environments. In such settings, the system has to continually plan ahead, accounting for either an adversary or an environment that may negate its actions or degrade its capabilities. This will involve projecting future states, as well as assessing recovery options, counter-measures, and progress towards system goals. For antifragile systems to be effective, we envision three self-* properties to be of key importance: self-exploration, self-learning and self-training. Systems should be able to efficiently self-explore – using adversarial search – the potential impact of the adversary’s attacks and compute the most resilient responses. The exploration can be assisted by prior knowledge of the adversary’s capabilities and attack strategies, which can be self-learned – using opponent modelling – from previous attacks and interactions. The system can self-train – using reinforcement learning – such that it evolves and improves itself as a result of being attacked. This paper discusses those visions and outlines their realisation in AWaRE, a cyber-resilient and self-adaptive multi-agent system.

Antifragile systems enhance their capabilities and become stronger when exposed to adverse conditions, stresses or attacks, making antifragility a desirable property for cyber defence systems that operate in contested military environments. Self-improvement in autonomic systems refers to the improvement of their self-* capabilities, so that they are able to (a) better handle previously known (anticipated) situations, and (b) deal with previously unknown (unanticipated) situations. In this position paper, we present a vision of using self-improvement through learning to achieve antifragility in autonomic cyber defence systems. We first enumerate some of the major challenges associated with realizing distributed self-improvement. We then propose a reference model for middleware frameworks for self-improving autonomic systems and a set of desirable features of such frameworks.