Resilient Reference Monitor for Distributed Access Control via Moving Target Defense

Abstract

Effective access control is dependent not only on the existence of strong policies but also on ensuring that the access control enforcement subsystem is adequately protected. Protecting this subsystem has not been adequately addressed in the literature. In general, it is assumed to be implemented as a reference monitor in a trusted computing base (TCB) that is tamper-proof. However, in distributed access control, ensuring TCB security kernel to be tamper proof is not always feasible. It needs to be implemented in software and on platforms that can potentially have vulnerabilities. We posit that allowing a very limited opportunity to the attacker to enumerate exploitable vulnerabilities in the access control subsystem can considerably facilitate its protection. Towards this end we propose a moving target defense framework for access control in a distributed environment. In this framework, access control is provided by cooperation of several distributed modules that materialize randomly, announce their services, enforce access control and then disappear to be replaced by another module randomly. As a result, the attacker does not know which process can be targeted to compromise the access control system.

Cybersecurity Dynamics: A Foundation for the Science of Cybersecurity

“…Moving-Target Defense (MTD) is a popular example of proactive defense. Many MTD techniques have been proposed (see, e.g., [90] and the numerous references therein) and many aspects of MTD have been investigated (see, e.g., [52,103,77,25,84]). However, very few studies have aimed at systematically quantifying the effectiveness of MTD.…”