Cyber Agility For Proactive Defense
The deterministic nature of the parameters of cyber components such as topology, configurations, protocols and vulnerabilities creates asymmetry in cyber warfare. It allows adversaries to plan, coordinate and launch attacks effectively, while defenders lack the capabilities to predict attack strategies or react it timely manner. Attack response or mitigation is usually very slow and it involves extensive manual operations. This research will explore ``Network Agility’’ as a new paradigm shift in cyber security to reverse this asymmetry and enable proactive, robust, and resilient defense. In this project we will plan to explore features of cyber agility to employ proactive and adaptive defense techniques. Proactive cyber agility will include deception, randomization, and obfuscation, to prevent attackers from reaching their goal or prohibitively increasing the cost for attacks. In addition, we will explore reactive/adaptive cyber agility aims to minimize the attack mitigating time and impact on the system. We will use reconnaissance and DoS (e.g., Crossfire) as case study attacks in our research.