Simulation-based approaches to studying effectiveness of moving-target network defense

Moving-target defense has been hypothesized as a potential game changer in cyber defense, in-cluding that for computer networks. However there has been little work to study how much proac-tively changing a network’s configuration can in-crease the difficulty for attackers and thus improve the resilience of the system under attack. In this pa-per we present a basic design schema of a moving-target network defense system. Based on this design schema, we conducted a simulation-based study to investigate the degree to which proactively chang-ing a network’s various parameters can decrease an adversary’s chance for success. We believe this is an important first step towards understanding why and how the concept of a moving target can be suc-cessfully applied to computer network defenses.