Toward effectiveness and agility of network security situational awareness using moving target defense (MTD)
Linqiang Ge, Wei Yu, Dan Shen, Genshe Chen, Khanh Pham, Erik Blasch, Chao Lu · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2014
Most enterprise networks are built to operate in a static configuration (e.g., static software stacks, network configurations, and application deployments). Nonetheless, static systems make it easy for a cyber adversary to plan and launch successful attacks. To address static vulnerability, moving target defense (MTD) has been proposed to increase the difficulty for the adversary to launch successful attacks. In this paper, we first present a literature review of existing MTD techniques. We then propose a generic defense framework, which can provision an incentive-compatible MTD mechanism through dynamically migrating server locations. We also present a user-server mapping mechanism, which not only improves system resiliency, but also ensures network performance. We demonstrate a MTD with a multi-user network communication and our data shows that the proposed framework can effectively improve the resiliency and agility of the system while achieving good network timeliness and throughput performance.