An active defense model based on situational awareness and firewalls

Abstract

SummaryWith the rapid development of the internet, cyberspace security issues have become increasingly prominent. The importance of constructing a cyberspace security system is self‐evident, but compared with attackers, defenders in cyberspace are in a castle‐like passive defense state in most cases. Therefore, building a reliable, accurate, timely, and active defense system is challenging. The key is to accurately focus on defense priorities, the anticipation of attackers who will likely succeed, and blocking attacks in a timely manner. In this article, we propose an active defense model based on the interaction of situational awareness and firewalls. First, by biasing the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of assets to get the score of assets, and using the Common Vulnerability Scoring System to assess the threat level of assets, we combine the two to determine the maximum system damage that the asset will suffer if it is lost, and then focus on defense. Meanwhile, log analysis of the network situational awareness platform can predict successful attackers, and then the linked firewall strategy can block these attacks in time before the attackers obtain attack gains. After that, we force the attackers to give up their attacks on the target by increasing the attack cost. We compared our model with iptables auto‐blocking and nginx auto‐blocking, and our model excelled them across the board in terms of comprehensiveness and false positive rate. The experimental results verify thar our active defense model proposed in this article can better reduce the defense cost and increase the attack cost, thus achieving the relatively defense goal.