A Framework for Moving Target Defense Quantification

Connell, Warren; Albanese, Massimiliano; Sridhar, Varadharajan

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-58469-0_9

Cited by 12 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…VM live and cold migration propose to repeatedly relocate VMs across various physical hosts. Doing so for the purpose of defense has been addressed in previous work dealing with MTD and network defense in general [1,6,17,22,24,34,39], with suggested schemes generally differing in whether a VM's state is preserved or not. State preserving migration that we denote as live migration intends to seamlessly move a VM out of the attacker's reach while keeping it as is.…”

Section: Defense Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the other hand, there is also research investigating whether a defensive technique contributes to security in the first place. Proposals range from mathematical formalization [16,17] through modeling and simulation [24] to real-world testbeds [15,37]. Yet, these either focus on only small sections of larger networks, thus potentially neglecting environmental factors, or require too much effort to consider numerous techniques and scenarios as is the case with testbeds.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Automated benchmark network diversification for realistic attack simulation with application to moving target defense

Bajic

Becker²

2021

Int. J. Inf. Secur.

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With numbers of exploitable vulnerabilities and attacks on networks constantly increasing, it is important to employ defensive techniques to protect one’s systems. A wide range of defenses are available and new paradigms such as Moving Target Defense (MTD) rise in popularity. But to make informed decisions on which defenses to implement, it is necessary to evaluate their effectiveness first. In many cases, the full impact these techniques have on security is not well understood yet. In this paper we propose network defense evaluation based on detailed attack simulation. Using a flexible modeling language, networks, attacks, and defenses are described in high detail, yielding a fine-grained scenario definition. Based on this, an automated instantiator generates a wide range of realistic benchmark networks. These serve to perform simulations, allowing to evaluate the security impact of different defenses, both quantitatively and qualitatively. A case study based on a mid-sized corporate network scenario and different Moving Target Defenses illustrates the usefulness of this approach. Results show that virtual machine migration, a frequently suggested MTD technique, more often degrades than improves security. Hence, we argue that evaluation based on realistic attack simulation is a qualified approach to examine and verify claims of newly proposed defense techniques.

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Section: Defense Techniquesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automated benchmark network diversification for realistic attack simulation with application to moving target defense

Bajic

Becker²

2021

Int. J. Inf. Secur.

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“…Furthermore, Connell et al [5] presented a framework for the qualification of MTD techniques. Hence it is possible to determine the effectiveness of the techniques based on the probability of the attackers' success.…”

Section: Hybrid Approachesmentioning

confidence: 99%

OpenMTD

Poschinger

Rodday

Labaca-Castro

et al. 2020

Proceedings of the 7th ACM Workshop on Moving Target Defense

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Moving Target Defense (MTD) represents a way of defending networked systems on different levels. It mainly focuses on shifting the different surfaces of the protected environment. Existing approaches studied on network-level are Port Hopping (PH), which shifts ports, and Network Address Shuffling (NAS), which steadily alters the network addresses of hosts. As a result, the formerly static attack surface now behaves dynamically whilst the relationship of ports to services and network addresses to hosts can be changed. Most MTD approaches have only been evaluated theoretically and comparisons are still lacking. Hence, based on existing results, it is not possible to contrast implementations like PH and NAS in terms of security and network performance. Finally, implementation details are usually not shared publicly. To mitigate these shortcomings, we developed a hybrid platform that evaluates such techniques and reimplemented PH and NAS with additional features such as connection tracker with fingerprinting service and a honeypot module, which is helpful to bypass attackers attempts. We created a common software platform to integrate approaches using the same gateway components and providing graphic network usability. The environment, named OpenMTD, has been open-sourced and works in a modular fashion allowing for easy extensions and future developments. We show that common attacks, starting with a reconnaissance phase were not able to successfully reach vulnerable hosts that are part of the OpenMTD-protected network. A new worm has been developed to spread across the network and the propagation paths showed that OpenMTD can lay the ground for extending protection mechanisms against self-propagating threats. CCS CONCEPTS • Networks → Network security; • Security and privacy → Network security.

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“…Some prior works propose producing frameworks in order to evaluate the impacts of a combination of MTDs. Connell et al proposed a quantification framework by combining multiple existing MTDs in order to analyze the extent to which these MTDs could reduce the likelihood of successful attacks [9]. Another framework [10] was also studied to evaluate the security effects on a network system to determine the MTDs that were most effective in a realistic network system.…”

Section: Moving Target Defensesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analyzing the Effect of Moving Target Defense for a Web System

Koide

Sakurai

2019

IJNC

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Moving target defense (MTD) is a feasible idea for reducing the ratio of successful attacks by altering or diversifying the attributes or parameters of a protected system. As a result of applying MTD techniques to a system, an attacker would have more difficulties in launching attacks. Although several MTD techniques have been proposed for different types of attack, estimating the effectiveness of combining these MTDs remains a challenge. With the aim of setting up a method for evaluating MTDs, we first propose a model composed of two MTD diversification techniques to compare an attack success ratio between theoretical and experimental probability. To validate the proposed model, we conducted an experiment involving an actual attack and then analyzed how our MTD model can adequately estimate a binary-code injection attack. Results show that the rate of attack success is 100% when MTD diversification is not implemented, while the rate is reduced depending on how many variants can be diversified in a target system. Our method is an important first step toward establishing a method for evaluating MTDs, as well as predicting an MTD's defensive abilities.

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A Framework for Moving Target Defense Quantification

Cited by 12 publications

References 14 publications

Automated benchmark network diversification for realistic attack simulation with application to moving target defense

Automated benchmark network diversification for realistic attack simulation with application to moving target defense

OpenMTD

Analyzing the Effect of Moving Target Defense for a Web System

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