Analysis of Port Hopping for Proactive Cyber Defense

Abstract

Port hopping is a typical proactive cyber defense technology, which hides the service identity and confuses attackers during reconnaissance by constantly altering service ports. Although several kinds of port hopping mechanisms have been proposed and implemented, but it is still unknown how effective port hopping is and under what circumstances it is a viable moving target defense because the existed works are limited and they usually discuss only a few parameters. Besides, in many cases the defense effectiveness has been studied empirically.