Performance Modeling of Moving Target Defenses

Abstract

In recent years, Moving Target Defense (MTD) has emerged as a potential game changer in the security landscape, due to its potential to create asymmetric uncertainty that favors the defender. Many different MTD techniques have then been proposed, each addressing an often very specific set of attack vectors. Despite the huge progress made in this area, there are still some critical gaps with respect to the analysis and quantification of the cost and benefits of deploying MTD techniques. In fact, common metrics to assess the performance of these techniques are still lacking and most of them tend to assess their performance in different and often incompatible ways. This paper addresses these gaps by proposing a quantitative analytic model for assessing the resource availability and performance of MTDs, and a method for the determination of the highest possible reconfiguration rate, and thus smallest probability of attacker's success, that meets performance and stability constraints. Finally, we present an experimental validation of the proposed approach.