This work proposes a moving target defense (MTD) strategy to detect coordinated cyber-physical attacks (CCPAs) against power grids. A CCPA consists of a physical attack, such as disconnecting a transmission line, followed by a coordinated cyber attack that injects false data into the sensor measurements to mask the effects of the physical attack. Such attacks can lead to undetectable line outages and cause significant damage to the grid. The main idea of the proposed approach is to invalidate the knowledge that the attackers use to mask the effects of the physical attack by actively perturbing the grid's transmission line reactances using distributed flexible AC transmission system (D-FACTS) devices. We identify the MTD design criteria in this context to thwart CCPAs. The proposed MTD design consists of two parts. First, we identify the subset of links for D-FACTS device deployment that enables the defender to detect CCPAs against any link in the system. Then, in order to minimize the defense cost during the system's operational time, we use a game-theoretic approach to identify the best subset of links (within the D-FACTS deployment set) to perturb which will provide adequate protection. Extensive simulations performed using the MATPOWER simulator on IEEE bus systems verify the effectiveness of our approach in detecting CCPAs and reducing the operator's defense cost.
This work proposes a moving target defense (MTD) strategy to detect coordinated cyber-physical attacks (CCPAs) against power grids. The main idea of the proposed approach is to invalidate the knowledge that the attackers use to mask the effects of their physical attack by actively perturbing the grid's transmission line reactances via distributed flexible AC transmission system (D-FACTS) devices. The proposed MTD design consists of two parts. First, we identify the subset of links for D-FACTS device deployment that enables the defender to detect CCPAs against any link in the system. Then, in o…
This work establishes a game-theoretic framework to study cross-layer coordinated attacks on cyber-physical systems (CPSs). The attacker can interfere with the physical process and launch jamming attacks on the communication channels simultaneously. At the same time, the defender can dodge the jamming by dispensing with observations. The generic framework captures a wide variety of classic attack models on CPSs. Leveraging dynamic programming techniques, we fully characterize the Subgame Perfect Equilibrium (SPE) control strategies. We also derive the SPE observation and jamming strategies and…
Nowadays, considering the speed of the processes and the amount of data used in cyber defense, it cannot be expected to have an effective defense by using only human power without the help of automation systems. However, for the effective defense against dynamically evolving attacks on networks, it is difficult to develop software with conventional fixed algorithms. This can be achieved by using artificial intelligence methods that provide flexibility and learning capability. The likelihood of developing cyber defense capabilities through increased intelligence of defense systems is quite high…
From denial-of-service attacks to spreading of ransomware or other malware across an organization's network, it is possible that manually operated defenses are not able to respond in real time at the scale required, and when a breach is detected and remediated the damage is already made. Autonomous cyber defenses therefore become essential to mitigate the risk of successful attacks and their damage, especially when the response time, effort and accuracy required in those defenses is impractical or impossible through defenses operated exclusively by humans. Autonomous agents have the potential …
The 1st International Workshop on Adaptive Cyber Defense was held as part of the 2021 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. This workshop was organized to share research that explores unique applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) as foundational capabilities for the pursuit of adaptive cyber defense. The cyber domain cannot currently be reliably and effectively defended without extensive reliance on human experts. Skilled cyber defenders are in short supply and often cannot respond fast enough to cyber threats. Building on recent advances in…
With the recognition of cyberspace as an operating domain, concerted effort is now being placed on addressing it in the whole-of-domain manner found in land, sea, undersea, air, and space domains. Among the first steps in this effort is applying the standard supporting concepts of security, defense, and deterrence to the cyber domain. This paper presents an architecture that helps realize forward defense in cyberspace, wherein adversarial actions are repulsed as close to the origin as possible. However, substantial work remains in making the architecture an operational reality including furthe…
The concept of active cyber defense has been proposed for years. However, there are no mathematical models for characterizing the effectiveness of active cyber defense. In this paper, we fill the void by proposing a novel Markov process model that is native to the interaction between cyber attack and active cyber defense. Unfortunately, the native Markov process model cannot be tackled by the techniques we are aware of. We therefore simplify, via mean-field approximation, the Markov process model as a Dynamic System model that is amenable to analysis. This allows us to derive a set of valuable…
In the analysis of coordinated network attacks on electric power cyber-physical system (CPS), it is difficult to restore the complete attack path, and the intent of the attack cannot be identified automatically. A method is therefore proposed for the extracting patterns of coordinated network attacks on electric power CPS based on temporal-topological correlation. First, the attack events are aggregated according to the alarm log of the cyber space, and a temporal-causal Bayesian network-based cyber attack recognition algorithm is proposed to parse out the cyber attack sequences of the same at…
Cybersecurity dynamics is a mathematical approach to modeling and analyzing cyber attack-defense interactions in networks. In this paper, we advance the state-of-the-art in characterizing one kind of cybersecurity dynamics, known as preventive and reactive cyber defense dynamics, which is a family of highly nonlinear system models. We prove that this dynamics in its general form with time-dependent parameters is globally attractive when the time-dependent parameters are ergodic, and is (almost) periodic when the time-dependent parameters have the stronger properties of being (almost) periodic.…
Social engineering attacks are phenomena that are equally applicable to both the physical world and cyberspace. These attacks in the physical world have been studied for a much longer time than their counterpart in cyberspace. This motivates us to investigate how social engineering attacks in the physical world and cyberspace relate to each other, including their common characteristics and unique features. For this purpose, we propose a methodology to unify social engineering attacks and defenses in the physical world and cyberspace into a single framework, including: (i) a systematic model ba…
The Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) is a vital element in the current development of the smart grid. AMI technologies provide electric utilities with an effective way of continuous monitoring and remote control of smart grid components. However, owing to its increasing scale and cyber-physical nature, the AMI has been faced with security threats in both cyber and physical domains. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the crucial cyber-physical attacks and counter defense mechanisms in the AMI. First, two attack surfaces are surveyed in the AMI including the communication networ…
Within the future Global Information Grid, complex massively interconnected systems, isolated defense vehicles, sensors and effectors, and infrastructures and systems demanding extremely low failure rates, to which human security operators cannot have an easy access and cannot deliver fast enough reactions to cyber-attacks, need an active, autonomous and intelligent cyber defense. Multi Agent Systems for Cyber Defense may provide an answer to this requirement. This paper presents the concept and architecture of an Autonomous Intelligent Cyber defense Agent (AICA). First, we describe the ration…
A design framework recently has been developed to stabilize interconnected multiagent systems in a distributed manner, and systematically capture the architectural aspect of cyber-physical systems. Such a control theoretic framework, however, results in a stabilization protocol which is passive with respect to the cyber attacks and conservative regarding the guaranteed level of resiliency. We treat the control layer topology and stabilization gains as the degrees of freedom, and develop a mixed control and cybersecurity design framework to address the above concerns. From a control perspective…
This report - a major revision of its previous release - describes a reference architecture for intelligent software agents performing active, largely autonomous cyber-defense actions on military networks of computing and communicating devices. The report is produced by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Research Task Group (RTG) IST-152 "Intelligent Autonomous Agents for Cyber Defense and Resilience". In a conflict with a technically sophisticated adversary, NATO military tactical networks will operate in a heavily contested battlefield. Enemy software cyber agents - malware - will…
In the coming years, the future of military combat will include, on one hand, artificial intelligence-optimized complex command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and networks and, on the other hand, autonomous intelligent Things fighting autonomous intelligent Things at a fast pace. Under this perspective, enemy forces will seek to disable or disturb our autonomous Things and our complex infrastructures and systems. Autonomy, scale and complexity in our defense systems will trigger new cyber-attack strategies, and autonomous intelligent …
It is challenging for a security analyst to detect or defend against cyber-attacks. Moreover, traditional defense deployment methods require the security analyst to manually enforce the defenses in the presence of uncertainties about the defense to deploy. As a result, it is essential to develop an automated and resilient defense deployment mechanism to thwart the new generation of attacks. In this paper, we propose a framework based on Markov Decision Process (MDP) and Q-learning to automatically generate optimal defense solutions for networked system states. The framework consists of four ph…
This paper sets the context for the urgency for cyber autonomy, and the current gaps of the cyber security industry. A novel framework proposing four phases of maturity for full cyber autonomy will be discussed. The paper also reviews new and emerging cyber security automation techniques and tools, and discusses their impact on society, the perceived cyber security skills gap/shortage and national security. We will also be discussing the delicate balance between national security, human rights and ethics, and the potential demise of the manual penetration testing industry in the face of automa…
COVID-19 (Coronavirus) hit the global society and economy with a big surprise. In particular, work-from-home has become a new norm for employees. Despite the fact that COVID-19 can equally attack innocent people and cybercriminals, it is ironic to see surges in cyberattacks leveraging COVID-19 as a theme, dubbed COVID-19 themed cyberattacks or COVID-19 attacks for short, which represent a new phenomenon that has yet to be systematically understood. In this paper, we make the first step towards fully characterizing the landscape of these attacks, including their sophistication via the Cyber Kil…
Deception techniques have been widely seen as a game changer in cyber defense. In this paper, we review representative techniques in honeypots, honeytokens, and moving target defense, spanning from the late 1980s to the year 2021. Techniques from these three domains complement with each other and may be leveraged to build a holistic deception based defense. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been a work that provides a systematic retrospect of these three domains all together and investigates their integrated usage for orchestrated deceptions. Our paper aims to fill this gap.…
Intelligent autonomous agents will be widely present on the battlefield of the future. The proliferation of intelligent agents is the emerging reality of warfare, and they will form an ever growing fraction of total military assets. By necessity, intelligent autonomous cyber defense agents are likely to become primary cyber fighters on the future battlefield. Initial explorations have identified the key functions, components and their interactions for a potential reference architecture of such an agent. However, it is beyond the current state of AI to support an agent that could operate intell…
Networked-Control Systems (NCSs), a type of cyber-physical systems, consist of tightly integrated computing, communication and control technologies. While being very flexible environments, they are vulnerable to computing and networking attacks. Recent NCSs hacking incidents had major impact. They call for more research on cyber-physical security. Fears about the use of quantum computing to break current cryptosystems make matters worse. While the quantum threat motivated the creation of new disciplines to handle the issue, such as post-quantum cryptography, other fields have overlooked the ex…
Active cyber defenses based on temporal platform diversity have been proposed as way to make systems more resistant to attacks. These defenses change the properties of the platforms in order to make attacks more complicated. Unfortunately, little work has been done on measuring the effectiveness of these defenses. In this work, we use four different approaches to quantitatively analyze these defenses; an abstract analysis studies the algebraic models of a temporal platform diversity system; a set of experiments on a test bed measures the metrics of interest for the system; a game theoretic ana…
The increasing instances of advanced attacks call for a new defense paradigm that is active, autonomous, and adaptive, named as the \texttt{`3A'} defense paradigm. This chapter introduces three defense schemes that actively interact with attackers to increase the attack cost and gather threat information, i.e., defensive deception for detection and counter-deception, feedback-driven Moving Target Defense (MTD), and adaptive honeypot engagement. Due to the cyber deception, external noise, and the absent knowledge of the other players' behaviors and goals, these schemes possess three progressive…
Cyber security threats to the payment and banking system have become a worldwide menace. The phenomenon has forced financial institutions to take risks as part of their business model. Hence, deliberate investment in sophisticated technologies and security measures has become imperative to safeguard against heavy financial losses and information breaches that may occur due to cyber-attacks. The proliferation of cyber crimes is a huge concern for various stakeholders in the banking sector. Usually, cyber-attacks are carried out via software systems running on a computing system in cyberspace. A…
University of North Carolina Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）
With the increasing system complexity and attack sophistication, the necessity of autonomous cyber defense becomes vivid for cyber and cyber-physical systems (CPSs). Many existing frameworks in the current state-of-the-art either rely on static models with unrealistic assumptions, or fail to satisfy the system safety and security requirements. In this paper, we present a new hybrid autonomous agent architecture that aims to optimize and verify defense policies of reinforcement learning (RL) by incorporating constraints verification (using satisfiability modulo theory (SMT)) into the agent's de…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is envisioned to play a pivotal role in empowering intelligent, adaptive and autonomous security management in 5G and beyond networks, thanks to its potential to uncover hidden patterns from a large set of time-varying multi-dimensional data, and deliver faster and accurate decisions. Unfortunately, AI's capabilities and vulnerabilities make it a double-edged sword that may jeopardize the security of future networks. This paper sheds light on how AI may impact the security of 5G and its successive from its posture of defender, offender or victim, and recommends pot…
Adversarial dynamics are a critical facet within the cyber security domain, in which there exists a co-evolution between attackers and defenders in any given threat scenario. While defenders leverage capabilities to minimize the potential impact of an attack, the adversary is simultaneously developing countermeasures to the observed defenses. In this study, we develop a set of tools to model the adaptive strategy formulation of an intelligent actor against an active cyber defensive system. We encode strategies as binary chromosomes representing finite state machines that evolve according to Ho…
While the Internet of things (IoT) promises to improve areas such as energy efficiency, health care, and transportation, it is highly vulnerable to cyberattacks. In particular, DDoS attacks work by overflowing the bandwidth of a server. But many IoT devices form part of cyber-physical systems (CPS). Therefore, they can be used to launch a "physical" denial-of-service attack (PDoS) in which IoT devices overflow the "physical bandwidth" of a CPS. In this paper, we quantify the population-based risk to a group of IoT devices targeted by malware for a PDoS attack. To model the recruitment of bots,…
