Toward Proactive, Adaptive Defense: A Survey on Moving Target Defense

TLDR

Reactive defenses such as intrusion detection systems are limited because they cannot prevent attacks, leaving defenders behind as persistent, advanced threats proliferate, prompting the emergence of moving target defense as a proactive strategy. This survey aims to chart the trends in moving target defense research, offering insights and lessons for developers of proactive, adaptive security mechanisms. The authors conduct a comprehensive review of MTD’s key roles, design principles, classifications, common attacks, methodologies, algorithms, metrics, evaluation methods, and application domains, and analyze their pros and cons. The study highlights key insights and lessons learned, and proposes future research directions for advancing moving target defense.

Abstract

Reactive defense mechanisms, such as intrusion detection systems, have made significant efforts to secure a system or network for the last several decades. However, the nature of reactive security mechanisms has limitations because potential attackers cannot be prevented in advance. We are facing a reality with the proliferation of persistent, advanced, intelligent attacks while defenders are often way behind attackers in taking appropriate actions to thwart potential attackers. The concept of moving target defense (MTD) has emerged as a proactive defense mechanism aiming to prevent attacks. In this work, we conducted a comprehensive, in-depth survey to discuss the following aspects of MTD: key roles, design principles, classifications, common attacks, key methodologies, important algorithms, metrics, evaluation methods, and application domains. We discuss the pros and cons of all aspects of MTD surveyed in this work. Lastly, we highlight insights and lessons learned from this study and suggest future work directions. The aim of this paper is to provide the overall trends of MTD research in terms of critical aspects of defense systems for researchers who seek to develop proactive, adaptive MTD mechanisms.