Towards Self-Adaptive Cyber Deception for Defense

Abstract

Computer network attackers currently benefit from an asymmetric advantage, leveraging both features and flaws of networking protocols and software to discover and exploit vulnerabilities with impunity. Although significant work has been done to automate various cyber defenses, we believe that a novel area of research remains in combining autonomic reasoning and defensive cyber deception. While many difficulties remain in creating a robust system, we have actively explored the utility of such systems for achieving effective cyber defense. Our current approach applies autonomic reasoning to the task of interfering with an adversary’s movement through a cyber kill chain by employing deceptive countermeasures. In this paper, we explore the integration of autonomic computing with insights from game theory and cognitive and behavioral psychology to create a system for adaptive cyber defense using deception.