Effective Network Defense Strategies to Assure Service Continuity Under Collaborative Attacks

Abstract

Malicious attacks have become a major source of risk for service providers. In this paper, a network attack and defense scenario is modeled as a bi-level mathematical formulation where the commanders try to disrupt the services while the defender has to assure the service continuity. Since the high degree of complexity and non-deterministic characteristic, Monte Carlo simulations are applied to evaluate the average network survivability. As for the attack and defense scenario, an emerging type of attack, collaborative attack, is considered. The defender must apply appropriate strategies, which includes deploying various proactive and reactive defense mechanisms, under budget and predefined quality of service constraints to protect the system. The virtualization technology is also considered as the topology platform.