Offline Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Cyber Defense Agents
Alexander Wei, David Bierbrauer, Emily A. Nack, John Pavlik, Nathaniel D. Bastian · 2024
Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) present an evolving challenge in cybersecurity through increasingly sophisticated behavior. Cybersecurity Operations Centers (CSOCs) rely on standard playbooks to respond to myriad cyber threats; however, such methods quickly become outdated, leaving sensitive data at significant risk for theft and exploitation. To provide CSOCs with an advantage, playbooks capable of adapting to threats and environments must be developed for use with modern security orchestration and automation tools. Our methodology proposed herein trains autonomous cyber defense agents through offline reinforcement learning (RL) to address this need. Using the scalable, tailorable Cyber Virtual Assured Network, we simulate an APT conducting data exfiltration to then train an agent using offline RL and compare performance against a myopic policy. Initially, we see improvements in preventing exfiltration while ensuring authorized user access, but it is clear the agent must periodically retrain to account for changing adversarial behaviors.