A Quantitative Framework for Moving Target Defense Effectiveness Evaluation

Abstract

Static defense has proven to be a brittle mechanism for defending against cyber attack. Despite this, proactive defensive measures have not been widely deployed. This is because flexible proactive defensive measures such as Moving Target Defense (MTD) have as much potential to interfere with a network's ability to support the mission as they do to defend the network. In this paper we introduce an approach to defining and measuring MTD effects applied in a network environment to help guide MTD deployment decisions that successfully balance the potential security benefits of MTD deployment against the potential productivity costs.