2022/06/28 by Gabriel Ballot, Ballot, Gabriel, Vadim Malvone +5
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Cybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information and Cyber Security #Multiagent Systems (cs.MA) #Network Security and Intrusion Detection
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2206.14076
openalex publication_date 2022/06/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Since 2009, Moving Target Defense (MTD) has become a new paradigm of defensive mechanism that frequently changes the state of the target system to confuse the attacker. This frequent change is costly and leads to a trade-off between misleading the attacker and disrupting the quality of service. Optimizing the MTD activation frequency is necessary to develop this defense mechanism when facing realistic, multi-step attack scenarios. Attack modeling formalisms based on DAG are prominently used to specify these scenarios. Our contribution is a new DAG-based formalism for MTDs and its translation into a Price Timed Markov Decision Process to find the best activation frequencies against the attacker's time/cost-optimal strategies. For the first time, MTD activation frequencies are analyzed in a state-of-the-art DAG-based representation. Moreover, this is the first paper that considers the specificity of MTDs in the automatic analysis of attack modeling formalisms. Finally, we present some experimental results using Uppaal Stratego to demonstrate its applicability and relevance.