The Effectiveness Assessment for Network Based MTD Strategies
Xinli Xiong, Weiguang Xu, Guangsheng Zhao · 2018
In this paper, the assessment of effectiveness for diverse proactive strategies in Network based Moving Target Defense (NMTD) is studied. To evaluate those Moving Target (MT) techniques, we classify those methods into four catalogs and abstract those methods with different proactive strategies. With abstracted strategy, an evaluation model of effectiveness based on Balls into Bins and Generating Function is presented to give generalized solutions for diverse strategies under various circumstances. The primary metric of our model is the Probability of a Successful Reconnaissance (PSR) by given the size of Possible Configuration Space (PCS), a period of shifting, and time of probing. The proposed model is inspired by brute-force attack in password cracking and modified to contain characteristics of shifting in networks. Evaluations of effectiveness for several Network MT technologies are given, and the extensibility of our model has been analyzed. Apart from traditional methods, newly developed techniques are evaluated by the proposed model, and theoretical analysis shows that NMTD is an effective and promising proactive defense technology in thwarting network attacks.