Model-driven, Moving-Target Defense for Enterprise Network Security

This chapter presents the design and initial simulation results for a prototype moving-target defense (MTD) system, whose goal is to significantly increase the difficulty of attacks on enterprise networks. Most networks are static, which gives attacker’s a great advantage. Services are run on well-known ports at fixed, easily identifiable IP addresses. The goal of an MTD system is to eliminate the static nature of networks by continuously adapting their configuration over time in ways that seems random or chaotic to attackers, thus negating their advantage. The novelty of our approach lies in the use of runtime models that explicitly capture a network’s operational and security goals, the functionality required to achieve those goals, and the configuration of the system. The MTD system reasons over these models to determine how to make changes to the system that are invisible to users but appear chaotic to an attacker. Our system uses these runtime models to analyze both known and unknown vulnerabilities to ensure that adaptations occur often enough and in the right ways to protect the system against external attacks.