When Autonomous Intelligent Goodware Will Fight Autonomous Intelligent Malware: A Possible Future of Cyber Defense

Abstract

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 malware (AIM) will be part of the picture. Should these cyberattacks succeed while human operators remain unaware or unable to react fast enough due to the speed, scale or complexity of the mission, systems or attacks, missions would fail, our networks and C4ISR would be heavily disrupted, and command and control would be disabled. New cyber-defense doctrines and technologies are therefore required. Autonomous cyber defense (ACyD) is a new field of research and technology driven by the defense sector in anticipation of such threats to future military infrastructures, systems and operations. It will be implemented via swarms of autonomous intelligent cyber-defense agents (AICAs) that will fight AIM within our networks and systems. This paper presents this cyber-defense technology of the future, the current state of the art in this field and its main challenges. First, we review the rationale of the ACyD concept and its associated AICA technology. Then, we present the current research results from NATO's IST-152 Research Task Group on the AICA Reference Architecture. We then develop the 12 main technological challenges that must be resolved in the coming years, besides ethical and political issues.

High-Tech Defense Industries: Developing Autonomous Intelligent Systems

“…Autonomous cyber defense is an area that has been driven by the defense sector in anticipation of threats to military infrastructures, systems, and operations [44]. These systems will be implemented through autonomous and intelligent cyber-defense agents that will fight against intelligent autonomous malware [44] and are likely to become primary cyber fighters on the future battlefield [45].…”

Supporting the Royal Australian Navy's Campaign Plan for Robotics and Autonomous Systems: Emerging Missions and Technology Trends

“…HCI technologies are likely to further improve in the near term, particularly in relation to the speed, scope and accuracy of information transfer, brain-tomachine and brain-to-brain communications, inter-mous cyber defence and for cyber-resilient robotics and autonomous systems designs, such as autonomous response controllers and designs embedding mission-critical, safety-sensitive military effectors, systems and networks with autonomous intelligent cyber-defence agents (AICAs) to enable networks to operate despite cyberattacks. AICAs allow a system to autonomously acquire data from the environment and detect relevant cyber threats, analyse and elaborate on proposed cyber-defence actions, exchange information regarding the action with other agents or an operator across a central cyber C2 and formulate a response plan on basis of the information exchange (Boyd, 2019;Theron and Kott, 2019).…”

SpecForce: A Framework to Secure IoT Spectrum Sensors in the Internet of Battlefield Things

“…In the IoBT, the detection of the previous cyber-attack families has been tackled separately by the literature. Most works analyze software operations to detect malware and exploit vulnerabilities in generic IoT devices deployed in military scenarios [6]. However, only a few solutions deal with SSDF attacks detection in IoBT cognitive radio networks [7], and identification of IoBT devices [8].…”