Efficient Strategy Selection for Moving Target Defense Under Multiple Attacks

Abstract

In a real network environment, multiple types of attacks can occur. The more important the service or network, the more attacks it may suffer simultaneously. Moving target defense (MTD) technology is a revolutionary game-changing cyberspace technology that has found various applications in recent years. However, the existing strategies are targeted at defending against specific types of attacks and do not meet the security requirements for multiple attacks. Therefore, we propose a joint defense strategy based on the MTD that can select one or multiple mutant elements to defend against different types of attacks. In addition, we use the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to quantify the factors affecting the attack and defense costs. After comprehensively analyzing the effects of the different MTD technologies against different attacks, we propose an efficient strategy selection algorithm based on joint defense. Finally, we conduct experiments to evaluate the selection of a joint defense strategy under multiple attacks. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed joint defense strategy selection approach.