Paper accepted at ICCCN'23

15 May 2023, by Mathias Fischer

Photo: http://www.icccn.org/icccn23/

Our paper, ”Moving Target Defense for Service-oriented Mission-critical Networks” was accepted for publication at the 32nd International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (ICCCN 2023).

In this paper, we formulate an attacker-defender game to model moving target defense strategies against targeted attacks toward mission-critical systems.

We will present our results at the workshop in Hawaii in July 2023 and seek an exchange with international researchers.

Paper Abstract:

Modern mission-critical systems (MCS) are increasingly softwarized and interconnected. As a result, their complexity increased, and so their vulnerability against cyber-attacks. The current adoption of virtualization and service-oriented architectures (SOA) in MCSs provides additional flexibility that can be leveraged to withstand and mitigate attacks, e.g., by moving critical services or data flows. This enables the deployment of strategies for moving target defense (MTD), which allows stripping attackers of their asymmetric advantage from the long reconnaissance of MCSs. However, it is challenging to design MTD strategies, given the diverse threat landscape, resource limitations, and potential degradation in service availability. In this paper, we combine two optimization models to explore feasible service configurations for SOA-based systems and to derive subsequent MTD actions with their time schedule based on an attacker-defender game. Our results indicate that even for challenging and diverse attack scenarios, our models can defend the system by up to 90% of the system operation time with a limited MTD defender budget.