Towards Optimal Moving Target Defense--techniques and Applications

Book excerpt: Moving target defense system changes the attack surface at the run time to eliminates the attacker's asymmetric advantage of time. Common moving target defense techniques include thwarting ongoing attacks and increasing the time and difficulty required to discover the target system's configuration. Our moving target defense systems deploy cost-sensitive models and determine detection strategy, response option, or system configuration with pursuing minimum cost solutions. By adjusting parameters settings, the moving target defense systems adapt to user preference and surrounding environments, dynamically. In this dissertation, we will present moving target defense frameworks that accomplish different tasks including response, detection, and consensus. For each framework, we will discuss the model and application example in detail.