Coordinated Team Learning and Difference Rewards for Distributed Intrusion Response
Kleanthis Malialis, Sam Devlin, Daniel Kudenko⋆ · Frontiers in artificial intelligence and applications · 2014
Distributed denial of service attacks constitute a rapidly evolving threat in the current Internet. Multiagent Router Throttling is a novel approach to respond to such attacks. We demonstrate that our approach can significantly scale-up using hierarchical communication and coordinated team learning. Furthermore, we incorporate a form of reward shaping called difference rewards and show that the scalability of our system is significantly improved in experiments involving over 100 reinforcement learning agents. We also demonstrate that difference rewards constitute an ideal online learning mechanism for network intrusion response. We compare our proposed approach against a popular state-of-the-art router throttling technique from the network security literature, and we show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms it. We note that our approach can be useful in other related multiagent domains.